Oddly, my favorite part of this novel so far has been the description of how the plague spread and the journey we take as the reader following this one little flea.

It was meticulously laid out, and every time I thought surely that’s it, it just kept going. It thoroughly explored the prompt of just how many things had to go right (or wrong) for something like the bubonic plague to spread as widely as it did.

What makes this even more effective, in my opinion, is that the spread wasn’t just the result of negligence or bad decisions. Each decision made ranged from immoral, amoral, morally ambiguous, to morally upright. Sometimes the element of choice/decision wasn’t even there. And sometimes it was just the result of routine shipping and commerce.

But all of these things, equally, propelled us closer to the inevitable—poor, little Judith, fevered and in pain. Agnes trying to cure her, Mary and Eliza resigned, Susanna worried and confused, and Hamnet trying to take her place.

Just such a well done section of writing overall. Progressively more and more heartbreaking to see the sheer magnitude of a plague and how many lives it can claim in such a short amount of time. 💔

I’m really confused why we’re calling seeing ghosts/spirits a disability? Quote for context:

”You’re talking about his fear like he has control over it. But ghosts appearing from him might as well be like a seizure disorder or something. A stimulus causes a reaction that has really negative effects on him. It’s something so unpredictable that he’s constantly afraid of it, even when it’s not. So there’s the terror of when he does encounter a ghost, but the other three quarters come from your brother being stone-cold-terrified to leave his fucking house most days, because he might encounter them. It’s a disability.”

Like, hey? No, it’s not? I understand the description of constant fear, but the comparison to the fear that disabled people can feel about their body/brain actively working against them doesn’t make sense to me. If you’re seeing ghosts, that are actually there then that’s not the same thing. Yes, you’re reacting to stimuli, but it’s stimuli that’s THERE—not something your body/brain produced. Maybe you’re traumatized, I get that. That does sound frightening. But you don’t have a disability. Now, if we want to get into an actual discussion about C-PTSD or GAD, sure let’s discuss. But to just throw out that seeing ghosts is a disability, while comparing it to an actual disability people have, and then also saying nothing remotely productive or useful feels in such poor taste to me.