The Plague (Run­ning Press 2009) by Joanne Dahme is a his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, young adult novel. The hard­cover con­tains 272 pages and has a list price of $16.95 with the cheap­est ebook price I’ve seen of $9.99 at Ama­zon (Kin­dle) and B&N (Nook).

The pur­chase of this ebook was an impul­sive one. I’d read a pos­i­tive review of it some­where online and bought it imme­di­ately. Has any­one else read this book? The premise is as fol­lows: Nell and her younger brother George are left orphans after their par­ents die from the plague.

Shortly after their par­ents deaths and with the plague hold­ing Eng­land in it’s death grip, King Edward III approaches 15 year old Nell and asks her to be Princess Joan’s protector/body dou­ble because Nell bares a uncanny resem­blance to his daugh­ter. The two young women could pass for twins.

Princess Joan is trav­el­ing through plague infested towns to be with her betrothed, the Span­ish King of Castile. It is a polit­i­cal mar­riage that ensures the Plan­ta­genet line and England’s own inter­ests. The King feels that this betrothal jour­ney places his daugh­ter in some unfore­seen risk of dan­ger from his ene­mies, so, he has Nell act as the Princess in public.

Dur­ing the trip, Nell and com­pany run across vil­lage after vil­lage where peo­ple have either died from pesti­lence or they are half-dead and tired from car­ry­ing bod­ies to mass graves. There was one vil­lage where the group stopped to get pro­vi­sions that seemed empty of peo­ple but had plenty of food.

The fear of the plague kept most of the peo­ple away from cer­tain areas of the vil­lage that were occu­pied by plague-stricken peo­ple. Amaz­ing in that the vil­lagers would rather have starved than go any­place where the plague had struck and that’s not to say that I don’t blame them for keep­ing their distance.

You would never believe who the enemy of this story was…the Black Prince or more to the point, Princess Joan’s brother, the Prince of Wales. Prince Edward seems hell bent on Joan mak­ing the jour­ney to her betrothed no mat­ter what. He ignores the warn­ings about the plague and has Joan and the rest set­tle into one of the plague infested towns. Alas, Princess Joan, along with a priest and another per­son are dead from the plague.

The Black Prince (whose prefers to wear all black attire) decides to keep up the ruse of Nell pre­tend­ing to be Princess Joan but this puts Nell into a dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tion. Well, first of all, she would be con­sid­ered a fraud and the whole cha­rade could pro­voke war. Talk about a high risk sit­u­a­tion. But it seems that not every­body is on board with the Black Prince’s plans. In fact, two accom­plices of Prince Edward’s own entourage actu­ally help Nell and her brother to escape and that’s where I decid­edly stopped and put the book down. Why?

I’ll tell you. The story is super slow and had extra­ne­ous, bor­ing scenes that bogged down the story. While this story had a great idea/premise, unfor­tu­nately the exe­cu­tion of it was lack­ing. I strug­gled to read this story because the pac­ing was at times uneven. I looked for­ward to any and all dia­logue between any and all char­ac­ters and dreaded all the tir­ing exposition.

The story also had hints of para­nor­mal activ­ity sur­round­ing The Black Prince and his power over the black rats that seem to have infested the vil­lages and cas­tles and dun­geons. Even Nell’s brother, George, who is given some kind of amulet of a rat, men­tions that it has some type of mys­ti­cal power to it that causes Nell some unease but whips the rats into some type of fury.

Over­all ver­dict: I hon­estly didn’t care what hap­pened to these char­ac­ters or if Nell made it back to wher­ever it was she was going. Her brother George, who I assume was a sim­ple­ton based on his dia­logue, kept up his annoy­ing inter­est with that amulet. It’s a major dis­ap­point­ment for me to say this book wasn’t all that great.

I am always inter­ested in any­thing that deals with the Plague but this story was a far cry from what I had expected. This is a DNF. I tried skim­ming but said to hell with it and deleted it. Take this post as you will. Maybe some­one out there fin­ished it and had bet­ter luck than I did. DNF.

On the pos­i­tive side of things, the author does hone in on the despair and fear of the pan­demic that was wrought by the Black Death. It was the idea of this story that kept me going for awhile but I gave up. I just needed the story to have been a bit more tighter, char­ac­ters to have been fleshed out bet­ter with scenes that com­pelled me to turn the page. I didn’t find it here. Sorry.

Diana Norman’s The Vizard Mask fea­tured cap­ti­vat­ing scenes about the plague but the book is out of print. I’m told that Year of Won­ders by Geral­dine Brooks is a good read about the plague. The whole point is that there are good books out there if you’re look­ing for his­tor­i­cal fic­tion that fea­ture the plague. If you have any other rec­om­men­da­tions to share with read­ers, please do.