On her seventh birthday, Pauline rode across the lawns on her street followed by her best friend Henry, he on the blue wooden horse, she on the red. On the seventh lawn at the top of the street, she collapsed, becoming a sudden victim of the polio outbreak of the summer of 1954. Five years later, when In the Clear begins, she has survived, but paid a heavy price. A brace on her left leg allows her to walk, but she confines herself to her house, humiliated at the notion of being seen. Terrified by what Pauline has already suffered, her mother watches over her, forbidding her to play hockey on the ice rink her father has created in the backyard. In the Clear alternates, chapter by chapter, between Pauline's horror-filled year in the hospital five years earlier and her struggles to adapt in the present of 1959 and 1960. At the end of the book, her triumphs in past and present come together and she is able to move forward with new friendships, a renewed bond with her mother and, most important, a new faith in herself. Anne Laurel Carter is a hockey fan who had an ice rink in her own childhood Don Mills, Ontario backyard. She remembers her parents' stories about the polio "Summer Plague" in 1953. When she discovered that her favorite children's librarian had survived an iron lung herself, she was inspired to write In the Clear. In 1999, Anne won the Vicky Metcalf Award for her short story, Leaving the Iron Lung. This story would later become In the Clear. While this is Anne Laurel Carter's first novel for Orca, she is the author of a YA novel, The Girl on Evangeline Beach, and a picturebook, Tall in the Saddle (Orca, 1999), a Canadian Children's Book Centre "Our Choice" selection. She is a full-time writer living in Toronto, who still has a hockey rink in her backyard every winter.