Oliver, a contemporary London boy, finds himself, through a series of strange events, thrown back in time to the middle of the plague epidemic raging through London in the mid-seventeenth century.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From School Library Journal
Grade 4-8-- This tense and touching story is an emotionally sound, compelling, frightening book, with wonderful characters and gruesomely chilling yet authentic details of London during the plague, which makes it all the more disappointing that it has a plot full of holes. When a construction crew unearths something near Oliver's home that sends a workman running down the street in sheer terror, Oliver, a sensitive and isolated child, discovers a matching feeling of ominousness rising in himself. It intensifies when a courtly yet weird old man comes to claim a room at the boarding house his adoptive parents run, and he feels it has something to do with his centuries-old house. He is inextricably drawn back to 1665, and into the body of a pathetic young child trapped with his family inside this very same house, doomed to stay until they all die of the plague. Necessary details appear out of nowhere instead of being subtly set up earlier, and the potentially interesting subplot seems only to exist to contribute a few elements to the main plot and is never resolved. Neither is the main plot. Oliver grows emotionally, but there's no purpose to his experience. He doesn't change history, precipitate a great archeological find, and if he helped the old man, readers may not be sure how because it never becomes completely clear who or what he is, or how and why he came there. Much more satisfying books on a similar theme are Curry's Poor Tom's Ghost (Atheneum, 1977; o.p.) and Wiseman's Jeremy Visick (Houghton, 1981). --Annette Curtis Klause, Montgomery County Department of Public Libraries, MD
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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