Every person in this book is wrong about what is killing them.
Not foolish. Wrong in a specific and quite careful way, working from real observation toward an answer that happens to be the wrong answer. Nobody in 1348 had ever seen a bacterium or knew there was such a thing to see, and the tool that would show them one was three hundred years off.
Elsie is a peasant girl in England who wants to be an archer like her father and is not allowed to be anything. She and her friend Humphrey find a chest of stolen treasure in the woods, which is the adventure the book opens with, and then the plague reaches England and the adventure stops mattering. It is book twenty-four in the series, it runs about a hundred pages, and it closes with a section of facts and photographs about the real event.
The science it actually teaches
It earns its place on Stealth Science in a sideways manner, because most of the science here is science the characters do not have.
The actual chain is short and a nine year old can hold all of it. The plague bacterium lives in rodents. Fleas feed on the rodents. Inside the flea the bacteria multiply until they block its gut, so the flea can never get a proper meal and bites over and over, and each frantic bite pushes bacteria back into the wound. When the rat dies its fleas leave for whatever is warm and nearby, and in a grain store or a thatched roof what is warm and nearby is a person. The bite drains to the nearest lymph node, the node swells hard, and that swelling is the bubo the disease is named after. If it reaches the lungs it stops needing the flea at all, and a cough will do it.
So the disease has two speeds, and the second one is the reason a village could empty inside a fortnight.
Now the wrong idea, which is the better half of the lesson. The going explanation was bad air. Corruption rising off swamps and rot and the sick themselves, breathed in, doing the damage. That is not a stupid theory. It is built on the one piece of evidence anyone had, which is that places where people are dying smell terrible. It sent people after herbs, scented cloth and aromatic fires, and it sent them running from smells rather than from each other.
The strange part is that some of what they did worked anyway. Shutting your household in and letting nobody through the door cuts the lung route stone dead, whatever you think you are hiding from. Holding an arriving ship offshore for a set number of days outlasts the incubation, whatever you think is on board. The word quarantine comes from the Italian for forty, which is how many days they held them. People can build a defence that works while holding a picture of the enemy that is completely wrong, and that is worth a child knowing early.
Be clear about where this sits in the book, though. Elsie cannot know any of the above, so the story cannot teach it directly. The mechanism lives in the back matter and it lives with you. Read the last section first, before your child does.
The child it lands with
The one who found out the Middle Ages had knights and archers and now wants to know what the rest of it was actually like, and has been given nothing but castle cutaways.
The reluctant reader, because Tarshis writes short chapters that end on a hook and this one will go down in three sittings.
The child who asks how, not what, and will not be satisfied with a sentence like "lots of people got sick."
It does not land with a child who has recently had serious illness in the family, and it does not land with a child who is anxious about getting ill right now. That is not squeamishness on your part. It is timing.
One place to stop and talk
The first time a character in the story does anything to protect themselves from the sickness, stop and ask what your child thinks they believe the sickness is.
Then let them sit in it for a second. The protection makes perfect sense given the belief. The belief is wrong. That gap, between a sensible response and a wrong model, is the shape of nearly every mistake anyone ever makes, and it is much easier to see in 1348 than it is in your own kitchen.
What to know going in
The store bands this book at grade two, and this book is about a disease that killed somewhere between a third and a half of the people in England in about two years. Both of those sentences are true and they belong next to each other.
People your child has been introduced to die. The signs are on the page: fever, the swellings, the darkened skin that gave the thing its name. Bodies are collected and buried in numbers rather than one at a time.
For a seven or eight year old the frightening part is usually not the bodies. It is that no adult can stop it. Every grown-up in the story is as helpless as Elsie, and a small child reading a disaster book is generally counting on somebody in charge turning up. Nobody does.
There is a real part of this event the book will not carry, and you should know it is missing rather than find out later. As the plague moved through Europe, communities blamed outsiders and religious minorities for it, and there were massacres. A hundred page adventure written for grade two is not going to go there, and it is a genuine piece of what happened.
The book is not gratuitous. Tarshis does not linger. It is still mass death, aimed at children, and it should be a decision rather than a default.
Where to get it
It is $6.99 at I Survived the Black Death, 1348. The series numbering is decorative, so this needs none of the other twenty-three.
The reason to own this one rather than borrow it is the back matter. You will go back to it, probably more than once, and probably at a moment when a child asks something at bedtime that you want a page for rather than a guess.
One thing to put beside it. Find a picture of a flea printed large. The whole event turns on an insect a couple of millimetres long, no book at this level draws it at a size a child can actually look at, and the story does not land properly until they have seen the thing that carried it.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967: Who Fed the Bears
I Survived the Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967 (I Survived #17) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
California Wildfires, 2018: A Fire Starts Years Early
I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived #20) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
California Wildfires, 2018 in Panels: How Fire Moves
I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived Graphic Novel #13) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
Hurricane Katrina, 2005: Why They Could Not Leave
I Survived Hurricane Katrina, 2005 (I Survived Graphic Novel #6) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
