It's silly and predictable and delicious. ( )

you know how even before you walk into certain retail stores you can tell they may not be for you but the eye candy is just overwhelming and you spend time there gawking anyway even though you don’t like the muzak and you’re pretty sure you’re not going to buy anything you want to make your own ? That would be me reading this book. I would have possibly killed the wayward pet through neglect, impatience or outright hostility myself if given half a chance to step into the story. ;)

As for the westward expansion pioneer life in space setting, that was enjoyable enough as were a couple of the speculative technologies. ( )

Delanna hasn't been back to the planet Keramos since she was first sent away to school at the age of five, but after her mother dies, she returns to arrange to sell the property she's inherited. But selling land on Keramos turns out to be more complicated than expected, and Delanna is required to stay longer than she wants.

This is a science-fiction novel set on an isolated, rural planet that could easily have been an historical novel set in an isolated rural community. (Of course, just because a science-fiction novel could easily be translated into an historical novel is by no means an indication that it should have been.) It's not really about the science or the technology - people communicate mainly by radio - but about how Delanna deals with her circumstances.

It's the sort of story where, by the second chapter, I had a fair idea of where things were going to end and I liked that. I kept reading because I wanted to see how the characters got to that point (and also to see if I was right about that ending). ( )

Although I love nearly all of Connie Willis' books, I hadn't been that impressed by the other two I've read which she wrote in collaboration with Cynthia Felice: "Light Raid," which was entertaining enough, but not exceptional, and "Water Witch," which was too much of a romance novel for my taste. "Promised Land" is also a romance novel. I got the impression that it might even have originally been conceived of as a Wild West kinda romance, and then the authors decided to put a sci-fi veneer over the story. Delanna is a city girl who's been at school off-planet. But when her mother dies, she comes back to her frontier planet to liquidate her mother's farm and collect her inheritance. She barely recognizes the hayseed hick who comes to meet her, whom she knew as a little girl, but she takes an instant dislike to him. It's a complete shock to her to discover, that under planetary laws designed to protect family homesteads, she's married to him, and is legally unable to sell her land unless she lives on it - with him - for a year. She has no other assets, so she's forced to travel out to the land, which is literally in the middle of nowhere.
of course, a couple of other guys have romantic designs on Delanna, and there's a few light subplots here and there, but mainly Delanna becomes guilty that her mother always sent her money that she spent on parties and fancy clothes, learns to value the fruit of her own labors, falls in love with the hick, comes to appreciate the Simple Life, and decides to stay on the farm. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Puh-leeze. ( )

This is one of those books that I reread when I need something familiar and satisfying. I don't think it's Connie Willis's best, but sometimes I really do want to read a romance, and when I do I want one that's not quite formula but still light and a little predictable. ( )