Connie Willis writes great and interesting sci-fi/speculative fiction. This is no exception. Unlike other reviewers, I relished her attention to scientific detail, particularly as contrasted with the faux-religious hand waving that often goes along with writing (fiction or non) about NDEs. ( )

Look,this is a fine book but with one huge flaw - at least for this reader - it goes on and on and on with brain functions and dopamine enhancers and calumniations and nada nada nada. If it had been edited a bit, or maybe a lot it would have been much more readable. I finally had to give it up a little over half-way through. I was getting a head ache.

Passage by Connie Willis is way too long. I thought that the entire time I was reading this book, but I kept reading. I was fascinated with the idea of NDEs (near death experiences) and quickly got caught up in the lives of the characters.

Briefly, the main character, Dr. Joanna Lander, is researching NDEs. She hooks up with Dr. Richard Wright, who is trying to determine if there’s a chemical/physiological aspect to NDEs. As their research subjects fall by the wayside, Joanna takes controlled NDE-inducing drugs and starts gaining an understanding of what’s really happening.

I occasionally felt bludgeoned by the symbols and the characters explaining the meaning of those symbols. Subtlety would have been appreciated.

I also found Joana quite irritating at first. She was disorganized and inept beyond belief. She also needed assertiveness training to learn how to tell some particularly smarmy characters off. She forgot to eat, water her plants, didn’t return calls, didn’t check her pages at a hospital for goodness’ sake!, and seemed to be constantly spinning out of control. I don’t think I’d feel confident with her in control of a research project I was participating in.

The medical detail was way too much and yet…. overall the book worked. It would have worked at 580 pages instead of the 780 it came in at. Things got repeated and scenes built up at a painfully slow pace. Some judicious editing would have improved the pace.

But on the positive side her characters were deftly, if repetitiously, drawn. The first few hundred pages of irritating behavior and hiding in stairwells gave way to some serious attempts at describing near death experiences and understand the significance of small pieces of information. The mystery and discoveries are actually quite breathtaking.

The last third of the book is quite lyrical in spots, and the ending is upbeat in a strange unsettling way.

I can’t ever see myself reading it again, but I know it will stay with me for quite a while. ( )

Willis fans may be put off by this one: it doesn't have the light & sometimes even cutesy quality of some of her other work. (The darkness/seriousness regarding mortality that a part of Doomsday Book is a much stronger focus here.) But it does have interesting and well-drawn characters, and it manages to deal pretty well with some serious topics--death, wishful thinking, the human spirit . . . My favorite Willis novel. ( )

I enjoyed parts of this book, but a lot of it could have been cut out and it probably would have been a better book. The ideas presented about NDEs were interesting, but there was a lot of boring technical information that was way over my head. There was also a bit too much information about things that Joanna was trying to figure out (like the significance of the number 58) that became a bit much after a while. And why were there all the references to the cafeteria always being closed? Did that have anything to do with the story at all? I almost put this book down for good about halfway through it, then became interested in it again. I liked the disaster/SOS concept and liked the whole thing about the alzheimer's patient being between 2 places, but there was too much repetition of things that Joanna was trying to figure out and lots of useless information that I could have done without reading. After the big thing happened near the end (trying not to spoil it), the book went on a bit too long with Dr. Wright trying to figure things out just like Joanna did. I think I probably would have given a condensed version of this book a higher rating. ( )