Running Out of Time

The story takes place in a village called Clifton which, at first, seems to be a village from the early 1840's. Jessie is the main character, and her mother is a midwife for the village.

Things appear normal, for the time, until a diptheria epidemic starts and children begin to become ill. Jessie's mother reveals that there is a way to get help, but Jessie will have to go outside Clifton. She also reveals that Clifton is a lie; the year is really 1996, and Jessie will have to find a way to get through the “real” world even though she knows virtually nothing of it, and obtain medicine for the children.

The rest of the story deals with Jessie, who only has experiences in a world of the 1940's, trying to adapt almost instantly to a world with cars, convenience stories, telephones and television. Worse yet, she finds that her own life is in danger as the help she expected turns out to be a deadly enemy.

It's an interesting story as long as you go with the “suspension of disbelief” I've cited in other reviews. Once you really start thinking about the story, you realize there are numerous problems with the village and its explanation. I'll only site one of those: either Clifton is in a totally no-fly zone, or the people would have seen airplanes and wondered what they were. There is no practical way (unless the village had been placed in a totally isolated location) to prevent the outside world from intruding, even if it would only be in the form of planes and, perhaps, helicopters.

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