I usually love Connie Willis, but this novel failed to click for me. I had several problems: first, Willis asks readers to sympathize with Robert E. Lee, a lot. But even though Americans of my generation are kind of trained, from elementary school on up, to think of Lee as not such a bad guy, my sympathy, frankly, cuts off after a certain point. (Totally different debate here, but: blah blah blah duty, yeah sure; but basic morality trumps duty, okay?) More significant, probably, was how underdeveloped the characters in this felt: by the end I had no idea, really, of what type of guy Jeff was, and Annie I found mostly annoying. The parts of the narrative I found the most interesting were the bits about Lee’s horse Traveller; I’m willing to go out on a limb here and say that the main narrative draw should pretty much never be the horse. (Certain children’s novels excepted.) The whole book almost feels like a warm-up for Passage, and if this is what Willis needed to get out of her system in order to write that book, fine, because Passage is amazing. Lincoln’s Dreams, on the other hand…not so much.