Plague Thieves

Written by Caroline Fernandez

DCB Young Readers
978-1-77086-732-1
208 pp.
Ages 9-12
May 2024

 

It's 1665 and twelve-year-old Rose lives with her parents and sixteen-year-old brother Lem above their spice shop in London, England. Though Lem hates working in the shop, instead sneaking off to join his delinquent friends, Rose loves helping her father out, learning about spices for cooking, medicines, and cleaning. And then "the sickness crept into London." (pg. 5) When Mother comes back from the market with flea bites and takes to her bed, Father closes the shop and sends the children to stay there. Via notes, he instructs Rose to collect ingredients for him so that he might create a medicinal oil to heal Mother. But his efforts are to no avail and Mother dies. Before Father also succumbs to the illness they should not name aloud, he gives Rose the recipe for an oil he believes will protect them. He tells them all the ingredients but one, though Rose knows what it is. They are instructed to place the oil on a handkerchief and set it over their noses and mouths as a mask. His last warning is to not to tell anyone about the oil and to do whatever they must to survive.

 Steal. Trade. Survive. (pg. 18)

When they have left, Father burns the shop, and the two young people are truly homeless. With but a few coins and some silver spoons to trade, Rose and Lem each take one of the three bottles of oil she has made from Father's recipe and bury the third beneath a bridge where they also find shelter for themselves. And so begins their lives on the streets of London, finding any means to survive, including becoming thieves. That is, until Lem does not return one night. Now Rose is alone, evading anyone who recognizes her as the daughter of the spice merchant who was rumoured to know the cure for the Great Plague.

Rose builds a new life on the street with others who have lost jobs or homes because of the plague and are now struggling as she is to survive. Among these displaced persons are Elizabeth and her five-year-old daughter Clove; Amon, the son of a trader from Shanty Town; and two former farmhands Cinn and Cal. Rose doesn't know whom she can trust but she does know to avoid the black-clad man with the strange bird mask whom she calls the beast and who always seems to be around plague houses. 

From the mundane life of household chores, working with her father, and the drudgery of life in 1665 London, Rose's life becomes one of a dubious nature, never knowing whether there will be food, whether there will be shelter, who might be dangerous, and, worse of all, if they will be able to evade the plague itself. Accompanying Rose as she navigates arduous roads of grief and fear and desperation, young readers will get a very good idea about the historic hardships of an epidemic of which little was known, during which all actions were driven by fear. Caroline Fernandez tells Rose's story as an edge-of-your-seat read, keeping us wondering the whole time. We know there won't be a happy ending–it is the time of the Great Plague of London after all–but Caroline Fernandez invests us in Rose and other characters, most notably Amon, hopeful that they will survive and find some light out of the darkness. She definitely gives the atmosphere of anxiety and even despair, but she doesn't overdo it, never frightening the reader with the circumstances but instead helps us understand what life would have been like in 1665 London both before and during the Great Plague. With Plague Thieves, Caroline Fernandez has given us a spell-binding read that captivates but also enlightens about a time in which bleakness was almost inescapable.