A review by mdpenguin
All Clear by Connie Willis

adventurous emotional informative medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.75

This book hits on a number of my pet peeves. It relies a whole lot on really smart people doing dumb things, not knowing things about the period of time they supposedly specialized in, and keeping information back from each other for no particularly sane reason. The characters are more differentiated than in the first book, but only when the story is told from Polly's perspective. And when it is, they're just totally inconsistent. For example, Merope is treated like she's terribly naive and fragile despite the fact that she's a trained, time-traveling post-graduate historian who's completed a very tough mission by being tougher and smarter than everyone around her. And then when you get the story back in her perspective all of the differences between the characters go away again and she's suddenly very competent, confident, and clever again. 

And that's without going into the fact that the whole point of time traveling historians is to learn about things that you can't learn about through archival research and interviews, and yet they keep going to England in WWII, which is so insanely well documented that there are tons of very realistic books set in it (including these two). 

The ending almost is good but the author lays it on way too thick and keeps throwing more and more little tidbits in until it becomes unbelievable. It definitely has its moments that got me excited and/or emotional, but then it would just keep going beyond what was needed for either the scene or the story and it would all just become a bit too contrived for me. 

Overall, this is better than fair and maybe even a decent read. I think that if the duology had kept the plot points related to time travel a little more simple and focused more on telling the story of regular English people during the war then it could have been great. It comes across as though that was the real story that Willis wanted to write about anyway.