First up, the quote by Paul Cornell on the cover gives away a lot of the plot, immediately you are on the look out for a time travel angle in a book ostensibly about a fourteen year old girl moving to Liverpool after the collapse of her parent’s marriage and having to start again making new friends at a time of international tension, for it is October 1962 and Russia is moving nuclear missiles to Cuba in order to be able to have a shorter strike time against the USA and match the American missiles based in Turkey. Therefore when the somewhat creepy Miss Wells at Laura’s new school appears to know more than she should and also has a resemblance to what an older Laura might look like and Agatha at the cafe the school friends go to also looks similar and furthermore has what appears to be a tattier version of Laura’s diary in one pocket the reader is considerably less surprised than they probably should have been.

Laura is given the nickname of The H-Bomb Girl after the very unusual item she has hanging round her neck is spotted by her school friends. Not many teenage girls walk round with the priming key for a Vulcan bomber hanging on a chain. Her father is a senior RAF officer in charge of the UK nuclear warheads, and in a slightly convoluted plot line has decided that a good way to keep his daughter safe in the event of a nuclear war is to give her the key and get her to memorise a phone number to ring and the arming codes so that if things go badly, which he suspects may well be the case, she can call and be whisked away to a safe place. I’m more inclined to believe that both father and daughter would be more likely to be taken to prison than to a place of safety but a certain amount of leeway has to be given here as the plot has more holes than a colander and the more you think about it the less believable it becomes. After all Miss Wells and Agatha must have been hanging around for some time waiting for Laura to move to Liverpool as Miss Wells at least appears to have a senior role in the school and is not mentioned as a new arrival.

It’s a pity that Baxter didn’t do more research into the period, if he had then the three anachronisms that I spotted immediately, there may well be others, wouldn’t have appeared. The first is minor in that in the introduction by way of explaining pre-decimal currency to modern readers he mentions the farthing which had ceased to be legal currency in January 1961 almost two years before the book is set. The second is more significant as during one of the versions of the post missile crisis where the world descends into nuclear war he refers to the first strike on Liverpool which led to the melting of the glass crown on Paddy’s Wigwam aka the Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral of Liverpool. Unfortunately this building only started construction in October 1962, the same month as the crisis occurred, it wasn’t completed until 1967 and gained it’s nickname soon afterwards, so it wasn’t there to be destroyed in October 1962. If you don’t know why it got the nickname see here. Finally in a book about time travel which also has a character mention Doctor Who starting soon he got the year wrong as it was the 23rd November 1963 when the show was first broadcast, nobody would have known about the show in 1962 as the BBC didn’t even start referring to Doctor Who internally until the summer of 1963. Finally as somebody who studied nuclear engineering the positioning of the open nuclear pool in the main control room hall, whilst needed for the plot, is simply ridiculous. These obvious errors, especially to someone born in 1962, as I was, were mildly annoying but apart from them and the dubious plot holes the story was a fun read.