Explosion at Dawson Creek

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Some teenagers like to read about history. Fourteen-year-old Maggie
likes to live it. Twice already she has traveled back in time, once to
spend a summer in 18th-century Acadia and once to spend a year on a
prairie farm in the 1890s. And now the time travel bug has bitten again.
Maggie and her friend Marc climb aboard a Montreal-bound train in 1999.
But when they get off, they’re in Dawson Creek, British Columbia, in
1942.

Maggie has taken over the life of Margaret Anne Bruster, a youngster
who is kept as a virtual prisoner by a miserly restaurant owner named
Billie. Marc has become David Hunter, a teenager who is trying find work
to support six relatives back east. Completely unprepared, Marc and
Maggie are plunged into boomtown Dawson Creek, which is crawling with
American servicemen and rough-and-ready Canadian workers hired to build
the Alaska Highway.

Even in this third instalment of Maggie’s time-traveling adventures,
Elaine Breault Hammond shows no sign of running out of imagination. This
novel’s narrative is actually a series of interconnected subplots that
all move together like the wheels in a well-made watch. The attention
paid to historic detail shows a masterful knowledge of the era in which
it is set. Hammond expertly re-creates wartime Dawson Creek, complete
with sugar rationing, segregated picture shows, jitterbug contests, and
Victory cake. One hopes that this intelligent, first-rate novel will not
be the last in the series. Highly recommended.