Plague in the Mirror

Gr 9 Up—The summer before May's senior year, she goes to Florence with a friend of her mother's and her son, May's childhood best friend. May's parents are getting a divorce, and she needs to decide which one she will stay with once she returns. Liam, whom she has always thought of as a kind of brother, is showing signs that his feelings for her are far warmer than she's prepared to deal with. To compound her confusion, a haunting figure appears at the foot of her bed during the night. Her ghostlike twin has come to lure her into a desperate trade: May will go to 14th-century Florence, while she, Cristofana, takes her place in a world free of the plague. May visits ancient Florence with Cristofana and becomes obsessed with a handsome young artist named Marco. Will her passion lead her to choose what is clearly the more dangerous option? Although the premise should make Noyes's first YA novel an absorbing read, the dissonance that May experiences is the same that readers encounter while attempting to put a picture together of what this book is trying to be. Is it historical fiction? A horror story? A romance? A book can certainly be all three, but in this title, the history lessons are too forced, the horror is too unbelievable, and the romance so nonsensical that readers will be frustrated.—Kathy Kirchoefer, Henderson County Public Library, NC