Spoiler alert

Historians + time travel.  What's not to love in Connie Willis's book, Blackout?   I was so caught up in the action that I barely paused to wonder how Willis was going to wrap this up in the rapidly dwindling number of pages until the end of the book.

IT'S ONLY THE FIRST HALF!
Who does that?  There's not any ending, period. We're not talking volume 1, we're talking half a book. 
On a personal note: what sort of friend sends a book that stops abruptly with a note that you'll have to buy the second half (All Clear) if you want to know what happens?   Friends should not trick friends into starting books that                                  

ha ha - just kidding NOT

So, in 20 degree weather, and with a sore back, I trudged three blocks to the library... Would it be open? (Budget cuts).  What would I do if it weren't?  It was.  The book was there.  Wow.

My thoughts so far: read the first two sentences of this post....
But, I do have some nagging doubts - I think I know some crucial plot twists and I'm wondering if the author was a little too heavy handed.  My predictions (what I predicted last night when I turned off the light at 1 a.m. - about 2/3rds of the way through Blackout):   1) Sir Godfey Something- or-Other who lives in wartime London and is a Shakespearean actor, will turn out to be Colin Whats-his-face who lives in the future and is enamored of one of the main characters, Polly.    2) The Vicar will be someone from future.  He is too nice and he has said too many things which one could interpret as directed squarely at those stuck in the past... Well, I'm not so sure about #2.

Another minor grievance is that when Willis tries to include the "internal conflict" of two of the characters, it gets tedious**.
I get it; she wants us to see how they are constantly tormented by doubts.  But, these interior monologues just aren't interesting enough to bear so much repetition - especially when I think that, instead, she could have put an ending on the first half.  Ehem, I mean, especially when the deep thoughts are so limited for someone with my deep understanding of human psychology.  The characters are incredibly single-minded - all of them.  Nobody is caught thinking about mom, or a warm shower, or the person they have a crush on.  That is, if the repetition is supposed to be an accurate portrayal of the psyche - the inner workings of these characters, it leaves them pretty flat. hmmm... .  Am I not a man? etc. etc.

Willis isn't writing the next masterpiece of English literature (my guess about her intentions)- she's writing an exciting book which allows us to think about the nature of time, history, historians, life in the future, life in the past.  You know, escapist reading with a bit of meat on the bones. Time traveling historian - I actually thought about whether I might be qualified to pursue this as a career. 

OK - too lazy for more predictions.  Must read.

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** Note added later - I reworded this sentence about my "minor grievance" because the first version didn't include the adjective, "tedious".  When I finished the first book, it was still a fairly minor grievance.  But, by the end of the second book, I had lost patience with the plodding repetition of the time-travelers' doubts and fears.  I found myself skimming a lot.  I wish I could have written this book - seriously - both because I'm jealous of a talented author's  ideas - but also because (in my juvenile fantasies) I would have sat on it while I figured out how to make it move without losing the details that I enjoy.  It might take me years (once again, in my juvenile...)  No easy solution.  Y'see - the terrific "details" about lo cotidiano in WWII seem to come out in the day-to-day organization of the material (very chronological - almost a diary - which is not ironic at all in a time-traveling book,  but I won't explain what I mean by that).  This organization is also the root of the repetition ... speaking of repeti---
ha ha - and I complain the book got dull - I do go on...