Rating: 
Summary: A Magnificent Achievement
Review: It's hard to figure on how to write a review for this book without giving anything away. Suffice it to say, for the short hook, that this is a book that no reader should go without. Connie Willis takes a hard theme and makes it relatable, understandable, and devastatingly personal for any reader who's willing to accept the book to start with.I'm honestly amazed by some of the negative reviews that the novel gets. I can understand them, to a point--if you've read Connie Willis before, you may be somewhat distressed by the almost unbroken seriousness of tone and story in Lincoln's Dreams. This is not funny or amusing in the way that her better accepted stories are (Doomsday Book, for example, manages to maintain a sense of humor throughout the middle of its several hundred pages). Before you pick up this book, you need to understand that Connie doesn't go out of her way to make the story she's telling easy for you. Nor should she, if you ask me. I'm willing to go along with everything that Willis lays before me in this story, including the sometimes difficult to understand characters. You need to know, though, that they are difficult to understand not because they are flat, but because they are decidedly human (and real people can sometimes be some of the most two dimensional you will ever meet, and I'm including literary figures in that analysis). There are a couple of points in the story where you have to grant Willis some liberties, but for the most part the characters are internally consistent and understandable. The biggest obstacle that this story has is probably its theme--the destructive power of love. However, I was amazed to find when I took some time to sit back and think about the book that the author had managed not only to relate this fundamental theme to me, but that she had done so without the vitriolic hatred of the emotion that many who would try to address it seem to fall into. Indeed--the story shows the terrible destruction that love in all its forms can bring upon a person while still maintaining its desirability and its essential goodness. At the end of the story, you feel the loneliness that the lack of love brings, and I believe that this loneliness is the ultimate expression of the theme that Willis is trying to examine. And the fact that she was able to evoke this in me and show these things to me is what ultimately marks this novel as a triumph for me. I'm not normally one to be emotionally affected by a story, but Connie Willis has always managed to pull my strings, and nowhere more than in this story. This is not a happy story (though it is not without wit, as some would have you believe) but it is an important one, and a lesson that any person can draw. In short, it is a transcendant work that may very well be looked back on as one of the best novels of the last half of the century, and I don't throw that praise around lightly. At the very least, you should at least give the book a try.
Rating: 
Summary: I Like Connis Willis But This Is Flawed.
Review: Jeff Johnston, a young historical researcher doing work for a Civil War novelist, Broun, meets Annie, an emotionally disturbed young woman having vivid and terrifying dreams of events she does not know of or recognise. When she tells him of her dreams, he realises, and explains to her, that she is dreaming events from General Lee's life during the Civil War. He helps her to escape from her manipulative psychiatirst (who specialises in dream/sleep theory), and the both of them end up in Fredericksburg, ostensibly for research purposes, but in truth, for Annie to get to the bottom of her dreams. Ms Willis writes with the same style of doom and trapped frustration that she so excels at, and certainly themes of free will figure greatly in her works. However, the material never quite seemed to be able to bear the weight of this treatment (read her short story, "Fire Watch" for an excellent example of that style) and, instead, sinks beneath it. The novel tries to draw a parallel between the events of the Civil War and General Lee's life and the choices in Annie's own life. Central to the lives of both is the theme of duty, and how this drives each towards his / her own personal tragedy. However, for this to work, we need to understand why the characters feel as driven as they do to ultimately sacrifice their lives. Unfortunately, I never quite understood the characters' motivations enough to be entirely convinced or moved by their plights. I have read Willis' other works and liked some of them, so I tried to understand why I could not warm up to this one. Ultimately, I felt that the novel frequently resorted to trite and clumsy plot devices to set up events. One particular flaw I felt was the technique used of foreshadowing events in the real world with events in Broun's novel. This never quite works, and feels clumsy and tacked on. For example, Jeff, falling in love with Annie at first sight and going through hell for this woman he knows almost next to nothing about is foreshadowed with Jeff debating the merits of the character in the novel falling in love with a young nurse at first sight. Unfortunately, having Jeff TELL US that love at first sight is perfectly believable does not leave us convinced that his own act of falling in love at first sight is believable. The rest of the characters were given much of the same treatment with a lot of TELLING that they must-be-compelled to act in a certain way but never giving us the insight into WHY. Ultimately, this left me feeling impatient and unconvinced about their plights, and feeling mightily unsympathetic. Since this was central to how well the novel worked, that their suffering came across as hollow to me pretty much eviscerated the core of the novel. My Personal Rating Scale:
5 stars: Engaging, well-written, highly entertaining or informative, thought provoking, pushes the envelope in one or more ways, a classic.
4 stars: Engaging, well-written, highly entertaining or informative. Book that delivers well in terms of its specific genre or type, but does not do more than that.
3 stars: Competent. Does what it sets out to do competently, either on its own terms on within the genre, but is nothing special. May be clichéd but is still entertaining.
2 stars: Fails to deliver in various respects. Significantly clichéd. Writing is poor or pedestrian. Failed to hold my attention.
1 star: Abysmal. Fails in all respects.
Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking, enchanting, vintage Willis
Review: Kind of silly to call this "vintage" since it was her first novel (I think). Still, I just got around to reading it. This is one of those engrossing books where nothing really happened, and nothing really needed to. Connie Willis draws such rich and believable characters, you can see them, and feel them, and smell them -- you are drawn into their words, their thoughts, and in this book their dreams. A must read for fans of Willis, and a should read for anyone who dares to be challenged by the books they read. This one is a journey.
Rating: 
Summary: An interesting story (the Civil War) wrapped in a dull cover
Review: Lincoln's Dream's is the story of a young woman who has peculiar dreams that turn out to be views of events before and during the Civil War. The connections are revealed to her by a literary assistant to a famous novelist who writes about the Civil War. The dreams apparently are related to the experiences of Robert E. Lee, and in many instances demonstrate the personal and professional agony that Lee suffered during the war. Not much actually happens over the course of the story, other than the revelation that the dreams involve decisive battles, such as Chancelorsville and Getttysburg, or relate to members of Lee's family. The relationship of the dreams to the psychological disturbances of the protagonist is difficult to say. There is a mix of Freudian interpretation with concepts such as dreams as prodromal warnings (essentially dream magic). Since no one knows what dreams really mean, it would have been better to create some fantasy explanation, such as brain delta waves reflected into the future by some resonance amplification. Overall, the book is well-written, but lacks direction. It just seems to fizzle out at the end. I don't think this book compares favorably with other Willis novels.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but not moving
Review: Lincoln's Dreams is a story about Jeff, researcher for Broun, a American Civil War novelists. The story enfolds with Jeff meeting a young woman, Annie, whom is haunted by dreams of the Civil War. Annie believes she is having someone else's dreams. Jeff attempts to help Annie to get to the bottom of her dreams. In order to help her Jeff believes that he has to get her away from Richard, the psychiatrist that is treating Annie, and help her to have the dreams.
I enjoyed the novel from the perspective of exploring dream theories as well as the information it offered on the American Civil War, however as a whole WIllis failed to put the information together to create a novel with plausible characters and plot.
Rating:
Summary: Save the Dreamer
Review: Lincoln's Dreams is compelling, gentle, lyrical. A Civil War researcher and a Civil War dreamer travel the battlefields as the researcher tries to solve the mystery of the dreams and to save the dreamer. The history is fascinating, and the historical figures and sites come to life for the reader. When I finished this book, I couldn't move on to "the next one" -- I re-read the last 15 pages twice, and then the first few pages, and savored the experience. I won't forget this book, and neither will you.
Rating: 
Summary: Haunting historical novel
Review: Lincoln's dreams retains the smooth writing of all Connie Willis' books, but adds a haunting, meloncholy tone. Her characters stumble into the netherworld of parapsychology and are not able to get out. She brings the Civil War to life as vividly as "Across Five Aprils", but with the added chill of reliving this horror through a woman in modern times.
Rating:
Summary: A haunting book
Review: Lincoln's Dreams was the first book I read by Connie Willis, and the best by far. It is the story of a young Civil War historian who is pulled into the dream world of a disturbed young woman. The tragic story of the Civil War is deftly entertwined with the tragic story of that young woman
Ms. Willis did an outstanding job of researching the Civil War. Her story is rich in texture and detail. But the most extraordinary thing about this book is the incredible tension she builds with the progression of the story. This quiet little story generated the kind of menacing anxiety usually reserved for spy thrillers!
I have read everything Connie Willis has written, and greatly enjoyed most of it, but Lincoln's Dreams remains my favorite of her books
Rating: 
Summary: Dead boring.
Review: Nothing happens. Nice idea but Willis did nothing with it. What a waste
Rating:
Summary: An Early, Weaker Work by a Great Writer
Review: Now that Dauglas Adams is sadly no longer with us, Connie Willis clearly fulfills his place as the best Comic writer in SF. But the truth is, Willis is actually a better writer then Adams, because she is (1) more consistently brilliant then he is and (2) has serious, important issues running through her work. Her funny stories are rarely *just* funny. Lincoln's Dreams, however, is a first novel, and it shows. Lots of Willis's traits are there: the interest in History and in obscurities and ancedotes, the downplayed romance, the paralel storyline between a puzzle the characters have to solve and their personal lives, some very nice turns of phrase. But Lincoln's Dreams lacks alot of things Willis will improve on in her following works. The sense of humor, which is there even in her bleakest work (1993 Hugo and Nebula winner DOOMSDAY BOOK), is almost completely missing in this book. The characters - people tend to talk about Willis's characterisation, but in truth, Willis uses architypes all the time. The characters in her books are almost identical (Think about the female leads of Even the Queen, Passage and Bellwhether, or on the male characters in To Say Nothing of The Dog, Remake, and also Passage), bot because Willis can't write different characters (as she does with the Quivrin in *Doomsday Book*), but because she builds a comedy that is based on our instant recognition of the characters, and thus can focus on the serious issues she disguises in the crazy and funny plots. But in Lincoln's Dream, this ability isn't yet developed, and so the characters, instead of having the stock identity which allows us to sympathise with them while we follow their adventures, don't have any characterism whatsover. Broun and Annie are completely forgettable (Unlike Vallery in TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG, we never understand why Jeff falls for Annie). The only exceptions are Jeff, who is not yet the developed Willis leade personnality, but is the closest, and Richard, who is an archytype of later Willisean villains, but isn't quite one yet. But the greatest weakness in this novel is that, literally nothing happens. There is no plot as to speak of. There's the mystery of what is the source of Annie's dreams. We get three solutions to that, all satisfactory, but Willis hasn't yet mastered the art of having her characters come to realisation about the nature of the plot, which later she will become very good at. So we don't feel like there really is a mystery here - we're never involved with Jeff's quest, and we can't even try to guess ahead. And beyond the attempt to solve the dreams, we're in complete stasis throughout the book. Jeff and Annie are hiding from Richard, going to Civil War monuments, checking phone calls on the machine, and Jeff tries to convince Annie to take it easy. That's a simplification, but there really is little sense of progress. From page 50 to page 180 or so, the scenes are almost all interchangable. Ultimately, Lincoln's Dreams (which should've been called Lee's Dreams), is not a bad book. There is enough interesting history, and an interesting final solution to the mystery, to justify reading it. But it is nowhere near as powerful a book as Willis's later works.
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