This book follows Anna Frith, a young widow in a small 1666 English village, in the year that their town is set about by the plague and in which over half of the town dies. They decide to quarantine themselves instead of spreading the disease to the neighboring towns around them, and in doing so save the lives of many other people--although many of them die themselves. (That is based on a real town in the 1600s that did that very thing in England, which is probably the most interesting thing about the whole book.) Anna's home is the one with the first cases of the plague, and her two children die from it, and then she basically spends the rest of the year working to help others who are suffering from it, along with the preacher and his wife. The book shows how they all go through a crisis of faith and shows Anna particularly grappling with the cultural expectations for her as a woman and as a widow in this time period. She ends as a heroine, saving a baby from drowning, and escapes, randomly, to the Middle East.
I liked this book, but then parts of it felt kind of random and unnecessary. The whole last few chapters, with the climax and culmination of the book, took me totally by surprise and didn't seem related to the rest of the book at all. Particularly the epilogue, where Anna is somehow a wife to this Arabian doctor. It seems so unlikely. Also, I felt like sometimes Anna thought like more of a modern woman than could be expected from the 1600s. But I think I sometimes think that any time there's something semi-anachronistic, when it's pretty likely that a woman in that time period could have been not completely shocked by another woman who sleeps around, or something more modern like that. Overall, I liked this book, and if you can get past the pretty depressing topic where basically EVERYONE DIES, it's a pretty interesting look into this time period in history.
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