Adrienne Martini Reviews The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis
The Road to Roswell, Connie Willis (Del Rey 978-0-593-49985-6, $28, 416pp, hc) June 2023.
In short, The Road to Roswell is a romp in multi-award-winning author Connie Willis’s signature style. If what you need is the science fiction novel equivalent of a screwball movie with aliens, look no further. It is right here.
Things aren’t always what they seem in Roswell, New Mexico. Our hero Francie is fresh off a flight to the area to be the maid of honor in her friend’s wedding. Francie visits the wedding venue – the UFO Museum at the start of the annual UFO Festival – and is quickly drawn into a plot that centers on an alien and its need to do… something. As she works to figure out what that something is, other characters accumulate around her like she’s Katamari Damacy, with each new addition more colorful than the last. And each, of course, has his or her part to play in the plot.
As you’d expect from Willis, The Road to Roswell is tightly constructed but simultaneously feels shaggy, like the writer is just making it up as she goes along. Like the best magic in Vegas (and, yes, our crew winds up in Vegas), that trick is much harder than it looks. While this book lacks the depth of Willis’s best, it is great fun and a welcome addition to her canon.
Adrienne Martini has been reading or writing about science fiction for decades and has had two non-fiction, non-genre books published by Simon and Schuster. She lives in Upstate New York with one husband, two kids, and one corgi. She also runs a lot.
This review and more like it in the June 2023 issue of Locus.
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