Last summer I read two enjoyable science fiction novels by Connie Willis. Along with the J. A. Jance book, I picked up another Connie Willis book while at the cabin. Overall, a fall weekend at Sidetrack was rainy and chilly. Saturday was the exception. It was a beauty of a September day. I hiked about a half mile in the direction of Lake Clara to a spot where some tiger lillies grow along the road. Some of them had been mowed by the road crew, but their stalks were still identifiable. As I did a couple years ago, I dug up the roots of the plants in the mowing zone and brought them back to the one sunny garden spot at Sidetrack. I probably should have done more gardening than reading on that fine Saturday. The book I picked up was Promised Land, co-written by Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice. It's a story of a big city girl on the frontier. The pioneers and the citified visitor hold mutual disdain for one another. The visitor is at sea in the culture of the frontier. And it's a romance novel. It may be set on a planet far from earth, but it treats themes familiar to pulp fiction and Hollywood movies: city slicker out on the farm falls for the naive, socially inept hunk with a good heart. I should have guessed sooner than I did. Like Willis' other books, this one is full of character development. Unlike the books I read in June, this one is short on plot development. All that lack of action and descriptions of relationships should have given me clues. Maybe I didn't want to know. Maybe the science fiction label had my mind set in another direction. In any case, Promised Land doesn't measure up to the Willis books I read in Colorado. It seems that Willis and Felice have cleverly plugged in otherworldly biota and tecnnology for the familiar stiff of frontier America or Africa, but the story is old. And the hero is a bug.