![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avanta7COVER BLURB: It is history's most feared disease. It turned neighbor against neighbor, the civilized into the savage, and the living into the dead. Now...two eras are joined by a single trace of microscopic bacerium -- the invisible seeds of a new bubonic plague.
In the year 1348, a disgraced Spanish physician crosses a landscape of horrors to Avignon, France. There he will be sent on an impossible mission to England, to save the royal family from the Black Death.
Nearly seven hundred years later, a woman scientist digs up a clod of earth in London. In a world where medicine is tightly controlled, she will unearth a terror lying dormant for centuries.
From the primitive cures of the Middle Ages to the biological police state of our near future...is a thrilling race against time and mass destruction...Humankind's last hope for survival can come only from one place: out of a dark and tortured past.
My review: A compelling story. Like most novels dealing with simultaneous past and present storylines, the novel's structure takes the reader, chapter by chapter, from present to past and back again.
In the near future, antibiotic-resistant bacteria have ravaged the population, resulting in an Orwellian world where access to medicine and its practitioners is strictly controlled by governmental agents known as "BioCops", and people are routinely scanned for the presence of potential infections. The widowed Dr. Janie Crowe and her assistant arrive in England on a scientific expedition: to get soil samples in support of a thesis Dr. Crowe must write to start her new career. One soil sample they obtain contains a scrap of cloth, infected with dormant Yersinia pestis, the bacterium which causes bubonic plague. Through a series of plausible yet coincidental lab accidents, the dormant bacterium awakens and infects unsuspecting laboratory personnel.
Over 600 years previously, physician Alejandro Canches, a Spaniard and a Jew, commits a grave crime in his quest for medical knowledge. He flees his home to avoid execution and, again, through a series of more or less plausible coincidences, winds up being sent by Pope Clement of Avignon to the English court of King Edward as the new court physician. Alejandro is charged with seeing the royal family and its retinue safely through an outbreak of plague.
Alejandro's carefully documented notebook of medicinal herbs, potions and folk practices ties together these two distant eras, as both Dr. Crowe and Alejandro search desperately for a way to curb the horrific disease threatening their lives and the lives of those they love.
The author meticulously details the scientific and near-scientific processes involved in research and experimentation of both past and present. She deftly handles the complex social structures of the medieval world, and provides sufficient background material to support her creation of a near-future police state driven by terror of a new outbreak of disease. Unfortunately, her handling of romantic relationships is clumsy and awkward. Although the love affair Alejandro embarks upon helps drive the plot, the author would have done far better to steer clear of creating intimate moments for Dr. Crowe and her chosen swain.
That flaw aside, The Plague Tales moves quickly and makes few missteps as it hurtles to its conclusion. All loose ends are tied in the epilogue, although the epilogue itself is a bit unsatisfactory. Still, I would recommend this above-average historical fiction/medical thriller hybrid to anyone.
7 stars (out of 10)
In the year 1348, a disgraced Spanish physician crosses a landscape of horrors to Avignon, France. There he will be sent on an impossible mission to England, to save the royal family from the Black Death.
Nearly seven hundred years later, a woman scientist digs up a clod of earth in London. In a world where medicine is tightly controlled, she will unearth a terror lying dormant for centuries.
From the primitive cures of the Middle Ages to the biological police state of our near future...is a thrilling race against time and mass destruction...Humankind's last hope for survival can come only from one place: out of a dark and tortured past.
My review: A compelling story. Like most novels dealing with simultaneous past and present storylines, the novel's structure takes the reader, chapter by chapter, from present to past and back again.
In the near future, antibiotic-resistant bacteria have ravaged the population, resulting in an Orwellian world where access to medicine and its practitioners is strictly controlled by governmental agents known as "BioCops", and people are routinely scanned for the presence of potential infections. The widowed Dr. Janie Crowe and her assistant arrive in England on a scientific expedition: to get soil samples in support of a thesis Dr. Crowe must write to start her new career. One soil sample they obtain contains a scrap of cloth, infected with dormant Yersinia pestis, the bacterium which causes bubonic plague. Through a series of plausible yet coincidental lab accidents, the dormant bacterium awakens and infects unsuspecting laboratory personnel.
Over 600 years previously, physician Alejandro Canches, a Spaniard and a Jew, commits a grave crime in his quest for medical knowledge. He flees his home to avoid execution and, again, through a series of more or less plausible coincidences, winds up being sent by Pope Clement of Avignon to the English court of King Edward as the new court physician. Alejandro is charged with seeing the royal family and its retinue safely through an outbreak of plague.
Alejandro's carefully documented notebook of medicinal herbs, potions and folk practices ties together these two distant eras, as both Dr. Crowe and Alejandro search desperately for a way to curb the horrific disease threatening their lives and the lives of those they love.
The author meticulously details the scientific and near-scientific processes involved in research and experimentation of both past and present. She deftly handles the complex social structures of the medieval world, and provides sufficient background material to support her creation of a near-future police state driven by terror of a new outbreak of disease. Unfortunately, her handling of romantic relationships is clumsy and awkward. Although the love affair Alejandro embarks upon helps drive the plot, the author would have done far better to steer clear of creating intimate moments for Dr. Crowe and her chosen swain.
That flaw aside, The Plague Tales moves quickly and makes few missteps as it hurtles to its conclusion. All loose ends are tied in the epilogue, although the epilogue itself is a bit unsatisfactory. Still, I would recommend this above-average historical fiction/medical thriller hybrid to anyone.
7 stars (out of 10)
