Full review at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books 
 I love Connie Willis's work. I devour everything she writes, and I'm utterly incapable of judging her books impartially. She once granted me at 90-minute interview, and it's not an exaggeration to say that it changed my life. Which is why it's surprising that I did not care for her new book, Crosstalk, a romantic comedy that other reviewers are praising to the skies. I found this book to have a great concept but tedious pacing and sloppy characterization. I'm convinced that it could have lost half of its length without the story being affected in the slightest. 
 Crosstalk takes place about five minutes into the future. Briddey Flannigan works for a telecommunications company that is desperate to compete with Apple (Apple is, in this book, still faithfully releasing a new cell phone model about once a year or so). Briddey is juggling her job, her large, demanding and intrusive family, and her equally busy co-worker boyfriend, Trent. Trent wants Briddey to undergo an outpatient procedure called an EED that increases empathy between people who "have an emotional connection." On the other hand, another coworker, C.B., thinks that people really want less communication, not more - something Briddey comes to believe as her EED goes awry and triggers telepathy. 
 A lot of Connie Willis books feature a very specific writing style in which the protagonist is constantly faced with physical and social barriers while trying to get something important accomplished. For instance, in Passage, my favorite book by Willis, the protagonist spends much of her time trying to navigate a hospital that is under construction (so stairways are blocked off and the cafeteria is always closed and she keeps having to re-route to avoid fresh paint and obnoxious co-workers and patients). At the same time, the protagonist of Passage is constantly trying to communicate with people to no avail - they have Alzheimer's, or they don't answer their phones, or they just stepped out of their offices. In a book like Passage, or the much lighter Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog, this technique works for two reasons - it highlights the theme of the story, and it has serious stakes behind it. In other Willis books, like Bellwether, the technique works partly because the book is short so the technique does not have time to become tedious, so the book feels madcap instead of simply frustrating. 
 The book has some other weird weaknesses - weird because they are so unlike Willis' other work. Only people who are Irish, 100% Irish, are capable of telepathy, to which I say, "Huh wha?" At worst this has unfortunate implications about racial purity and at best it doesn't make any sense, something which Briddey herself points out. 
 The characters are appallingly flat. Trent is a one-dimensional character whose motivations are obvious all along. Briddey's niece, Maeve, is a nine-year old who acts like a thirteen-year old. Briddey is a helpless character who constantly needs to be rescued by C.B. and who is almost totally lacking in agency. Maeve's mom is a send-up of overprotective moms who is basically a reflection of a similar character in Passages - except that the high stakes in Passages made that flawed mom's motivations understandable, whereas the mom in Crosstalk is a caricature. C.B. is the only interesting character in Crosstalk. Willis has written amazing characters, male and female, in the past, but they are not to be found here. 
 This book is about the exhaustion of being bombarded by media and by interpersonal demands, and it does a great job of conveying that exhaustion. But it's also 495 pages of that same great job - which made it, for me at least, an exhausting read. I would suggest that if you want to give this book a try, don't pick it up when you are feeling overwhelmed or worn out. It's not depressing; it's just tiring. I didn't enjoy the romantic comedy aspect because I found not only the resolution but also many of the steps towards the resolution to be either predictable or irritating and the characters deadly dull and sometimes downright offensive in their passivity (Briddey) and their dishonesty (C.B.). 
 Since I read the book, Willis has stated in an interview for Verge that she "hates romance." When I interviewed her in 2013, her comments were more measured - she said that she preferred romantic comedy to romance. In a way, I think that the tightening of her view that romantic comedy is separate from romance and vastly superior to romance is evident in Crosstalk, a book in which the male lead is almost a stalker and is dishonest and controlling of the female lead, a book in which the heroine has no agency, and a book in which relationships are self-serving and usually toxic. I'm not saying that Willis has to write romance or even like romance. But I do think that in switching from "I prefer romantic comedy" to "I hate romance" she's lost sight of both the romantic and the comedy. This book failed at the two most important things a romantic comedy has to do. It did not make me want the leads to get together or to stay together and it didn't make me laugh. It just made me tired. 
 - Carrie S.