All Clear by Connie Willis is the second book in her Oxford Time Travel duo. Historians from 2060 travel to England during WWII to study the war and its effects on people.
Armed with the schedule of bombs dropped on London, Polly has traveled to the Blitz to study the people in shelters and how the almost nightly attacks affect them.
Her brief includes getting a job as a shop girl at the one department store not hit and renting a room in a street that is safe as well.
But her assignment also included checking in to give the team at Oxford her address so that if anything goes wrong they can pull her out. But her drop has not been opening so she cannot go back (technically forth!) and check in. The longer her drop does not open the more likely that she will be in London for longer than her list of bombs she studied.
Michael and Merope are having the same problem. Each of them know Polly and are going to London to find her and use her drop. If nothing else, it will be easier for the retrieval team to find them if they stick together. And due to the nature of time travel, even if the team at Oxford need time to figure it out, they can still travel back to when they need to for a rescue.
As the Blitz intensifies, the historians are living the history they wanted to study. But what if their prolonged stays cause ripples that change the outcome of the war or the people they meet?
Read this series! It is amazing. Connie Willis has come up with a fascinating timeline that puts readers and characters alike into the terror of war. What once seems like a simple plot, develops into a trap that readers will stay up late to escape.
Willis, Connie. (2010). All Clear. New York: Spectra.
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