15 Day Book Blogger Challenge: Day 4

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It's time for another installment of April's 15-day challenge!  Today's item is:  

Recommend a tear jerker.

Say what?  Hm, I am not much on tear jerkers unless they are Bollywood films.  I don't like stories with a lot of tragedy, since these days it seems like there is quite enough tragedy to deal with in real life.  I don't need extra.  (Bollywood films don't count, because they are so over the top about it.)


Aha!  I know!  Connie Willis' time-travel saga, Doomsday Book.  I've only read it once because it's so darn sad.  It's a great book!  And the sequel, To Say Nothing of the Dog, is clever and hilarious, so I've read that several times.  It's a great cheering-up book.  Ahem.  Doomsday Book--the publisher's summary:
For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.

But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin -- barely of age herself -- finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.
Kivrin accidentally arrives in the Black Plague, and meanwhile back in her own time, a new strain of influenza strikes down half of the people who are supposed to be monitoring her.  It's a great story, and it's really really really sad.

Edit after the fact: I didn't look carefully enough.  This is actually the prompt for Day 5, not 4.  Oops.  So, I'll do 4 tomorrow.

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