** spoiler alert ** 
 This was an enjoyable, fun read. Connie Willis has created a world where time travel works and historians spend their days travelling back in time to observe for themselves what life was like in the past. But history itself is a self-regulating, chaotic system and doesn't allow gross manipulations of the timeline, including bringing large objects from the past back to the present. Until one historian brings back a cat to save it from being drowned. Now they have to fix the problem before time becomes unravelled completely. Or maybe trying to fix the problem will only make things worse. Along the way, this novel pays its debts to Jerome K. Jerome and his boating trip, Victorian poetry, golden age whodunits, and P.G. Wodehouse. A fun summer read!