I have been on a Connie Willis kick lately. You may have read my review of To Say Nothing of the Dog – the hilarious comedy that reminds me of Jeeves and Wooster or The Importance of Being Earnest. Or, you may have heard me raving about Blackout and All Clear. At Christmas, I read and reviewed her collection of Christmas-themed short stories, A Lot Like Christmas. And I just re-read Doomsday and reviewed it, here. This review is for something totally different from Willis, Crosstalk. 

Crosstalk is part sci-fi and part psychological adventure with a little romance thrown in. No time travel. This book was a lot of fun to read and had an intriguing premise. That said, I will not give it to my teens as there is frequent discussion about unmarried characters having sex, and the plot revolves around sexual attraction. 

In the near future, doctors have discovered the ability to surgically stimulate an empathetic connection between romantic partners. Not quite telepathy, but definitely paranormal, neurosurgeons performing this outpatient procedure have waiting lists up to a year long.  

When Irish-American Briddey Flanagan’s relationship with her co-worker Trent starts to get serious, Trent insists that they undergo this procedure, allegedly so that she will be able to sense how much he loves her when he proposes. Briddey’s crazy and intrusive Irish family is dead-set against Trent and this trendy untested technology. But, Briddey goes through with it anyway. 

But, things do not go as planned, and Briddey gets far more than she expected from this procedure, including an intimate connection with the last person she expected to be intimate with.

This story is fast-moving, exciting, and has characters I really liked. The emphasis on Briddey’s Irishness is central to the storyline and tickled my fancy since I am part Irish and have attended boarding school in Ireland. 

The moral of the story is solid. The heroes are good. Trent is the jerk that we expect him to be – but how and why is a twist. And, it is a thoughtful look into what life would be like if you had no mental privacy at all. 

I recommend this to adults. Despite the frequent discussion of sexual attraction and references to being in the mind of the opposite gender in all situations, it is actually quite clean. The language is coarse, however. I am not making this one available to my teens because of the heavy emphasis on sexual connections.