Rating: 
Summary: two gripping stories
Review: I immensely enjoyed the two gripping stories told in Ann Benson's The Plague Tales. I am a medieval buff, so naturally found the story of Alejandro Canches the Jewish doctor from Spain interesting. Alejandro has a great desire to be able to cure all patients. When he is unable to cure a Christian patient of his, he unwisely exhumes the body to discover what really caused the death. He is caught and thrown in prison. His father arranges his release and from there we follow his adventures which are interwoven with the other plague tale of Janie Crowe. Janie is a surgeon who is undergoing retraining to be a forensic archeologist. She lives in a slightly futuristic world which seems much different than the one we would expect in 2005. Benson has rewritten history to include a world decimated by a virulent disease which wiped out millions.As some readers have noted the story is flawed in ways. A setting to be a little more in the distant future would be more believable. It stretches credulity to have professional people who have lived through an era of disease, be so reckless with unknown and known bacteria. In additions both stories endings are quickly patched to gather and leave the reader hanging. I would recommend this book to those who like science fiction or medieval settings and can get past a certain amount of the unbelievable happening.
Rating: 
Summary: One Great Book
Review: This is one outstanding book! I have been an avid reader for 50 years and I thought I have read them all until I read Anne Benson's "The Plaque Tales." For anyone who feels they were a "Physician" or "Healer" in some part or past life then this is the book to read. "The Plague Tales" touched me deeply. I felt myself...(as will you) that I was actually living Allejandro Cinches' life trying desperately to find a cure for the Black Plague that was killing hundreds of thousands of people of Western and Central Europe during the 14th century. But beware, the scenery Allejandro finds as he travels the many small towns and roads may give the faint of heart a sound tremor. Allejandro, is a good man, and a great Physician of great pride and determination. His life is dedicated to the understandings of the human body and all it's workings and weaknesses. As an early physician practitioner he battles an overwhelming disease amidst the fourteenth century Catholic Church's idiocy which is fighting him all the way, although the church members are dying themselves from this unexplainable black demon. With a vanishing world falling around him and a small journal that he has kept since his physician school, Allejandro holds all of man's destiny of past and present in his own hands. He must comprehend and try to find a cure for this incomprehensible disease if at all cost. Fortunately, there lay someone in the dark shadows that recognizes a treatment for this disastrous infection. But can Allejandro grasp the concept and apply it? This book is also in a rotation chapter with a modern day physician, Dr. Janie Crowe and her assistant, who is living in a new plague asylum world of their own. Seven hundred years later a nightmare breaks lose when this 14th century plague erupts again in present day London England through a strange line of unlikely coincidences. You will thoroughly enjoy this book if you appreciate medical thrillers as well as history. Everything is combined to give you one hell of a ride from start to finish!
Rating:
Summary: Many Kudos!
Review: Hats off to Ann Benson for two wonderful tales. Both stories very believable and readable. I found myself completely caught up in this book. Ms. Benson does a great job describing the environment in this book. You don't have to be a history buff to enjoy this book. Any reader will find himself or herself feeling for all the characters Ms. Benson has developed for this story. I never knew that much about the 1300's or the Black Death period. Now I'm wondering how mankind survived at all! Ms. Benson sure did her research to be able to write this book. And to do it so well! The reader gets an excellent description of how people lived during that time. I'm sure thankful that I live in these days! Ms. Benson didn't paint a very good picture of our future either. I pray that the world doesn't come to that! Between the intertwining of the two tales, Ms. Benson does a wonderful job of character development. The plot is fresh and interesting, a great "what if" story line with lots of action and peril. It does make the reader think and wonder too, about the world we now live in. I highly recommend this book. Lots of fun and entertainment.
Rating: 
Summary: A good story, but...
Review: The story line was great. LOVED the story line. The historical descriptions of the plague, of the environment in the 1400s, of the treatment of Jews, all brilliant and as or more accurate than I have seen in any historical novel. But there were holes. Not in the story, but in the details. In one paragraph, you find a character trying to accomplish X, and in the next X seems to have happened already but you can't figure out how. At one point, a British doctor takes his tempoerature and reads "104" - wow, if I were British, and using CELSIUS, I'd be worried, too!! And twice the author mentions the "numbing effect" of ibuprofin. So far as I know, it does no such thing (unless she's getting prescribed something really good!) Details, details. The story was incredible, imaginative, and drew me in. I was just infuriated with the rips in the seams of the storytelling. The reviews on the jacket said other authors "could learn a lot from Benson." I agree: they could learn both how to tell a riveting story, and how to avoid making the same very simple mistakes in conveying the detailed fabric of a tale.
Rating:
Summary: Now a favorite!
Review: This book was so good that I read it all in two days. I couldn't put it down. I loved alejandro's story the best, but both stories were great. Some reviews I have read said it was historically wrong, etc. Who cares, after all it is fiction! I am now excited about reading the sequel. I can't wait to tell my friends how good it is and hope they enjoy it as much as I did!
Rating: 
Summary: A plague of bad fiction
Review: Is it science fiction? Is it romantic? Is it fantasy? The author can't seem to make up her mind and we end up reading an uninteresting, silly story. The premise and the reviews lured me into buying this. I put it down numerous times because I couldn't read any further yet I kept picking it up in hopes that it HAD to get better. It didn't.
Rating: 
Summary: Great premise, terrible execution
Review: Here's yet another example of a fascinating and original premise that is so awkwardly handled that it renders the novel practically unreadable. The characters are so poorly drawn, clichéd, and unrealistic that at times you find yourself laughing out loud, and the many plot absurdities and failed attempts at historical verisimilitude, plus a frustratingly absurd ending, make the book come of as, well, silly. Don't get me wrong: I enjoy "check your brains at the door" books as much as the next person, but this one is so poorly executed that it's not worth the effort.
Rating:
Summary: A Plague on It
Review: This is not a positive review and tender sensibilities are forewarned. Plague Tales and the equally excrable sequel The Burning Road conjoin a grade D level medieval romance with a ludicrous 'near future' biohazard melodrama. The romance is competantly cliched and will not burden the reader with awareness of any historical, religious, scientific or psychological particulars of the period. The tale of a Jewish medico fated to serve as papal protector to the English court is sympathetically told. But it is history for those whose wading inclinations are to barely dampen the soles of the feet. Just one example: although the protaganist becomes deeply involved with a geo-political scheme hatched in papal Avignon, there is no mention of the papal schism that has two (later three) popes contending for Catholic supremacy, (the French-favored prelate was based on French territory while the pretender held forth in Rome). Small detail? History Lite does not adequately describe the shallow authorial awareness. But at least these chapters are readable. Alternating chapters occur in a near future after an unidentified plague, (it is given a cute, S King type name only in the sequel), has ravaged humanity. We are never informed to what degree humanity has been ravaged, an odd but typical instance of the author's insistence that the reader be as dumbed down as her characters. We do know that the female protaganist has lost her family and has been downgraded from her medical specialty to forensic archeology because the authorities have determined that there are too many medical specialists to support. Readers inclined to wonder why support for forensic archeologists would become preferable are advised to make use of a very large "Never Mind". The protaganist is in England to finish research on a thesis. The thesis subject is never identified ("Never Mind") but it requires her to take soil samples from numerous unidentified London-area sites, just one of which happens to be a large undeveloped field containing a burial ground for 14th century plague victims. This location, which has escaped the attention of the avidly historically inclined British (as well as real estate developers in the greater London area), is watched over by an idiot non-savant who has the best reason in the book for his poorly articulated reasoning process. The protaganist digs up plague infected dirt and, by an accident caused through her own oversight, starts a chain of infection that threatens release of the bubonic plague in a new and improved version. That all of the characters in these chapters of the novel are professional geneticists, bio-researchers and are working within the context of the most advanced British new plague research facility makes the subsequent action laughably ridiculous. Every internal safeguard and standard handling procedure is ignored and flaunted by all concerned. After the umpteenth such plot device when a character wrings their hands with "How did we get into this situation?" all I could do was shout, because you are such flipping dingbats. One well understands why the authorities reduced the protaganist to a lesser medical specialty; her incompetance and moral failures are self-evident. Her speciality is more of the woe is me sort but her goal of regaining her professional status does seem to fit culturally with the strivings of those who feel they deserve more than their abilities or talents warrant. Those authorities, of course, are cartoonish to the extreme and Englishmen are reduced to verbal ticks to convince us of their cultural inclinations. But why go on with this litany of authorial absurdity? The cover promised science and historical lore (wisely it did not promise intelligent writing), but sadly, neither of these are forthcoming. The comparison made with Preston's The Hot Zone is bogus and phony. That book, which features an intelligent, professional female protaganist, useful scientific discussions, a competant awareness of bureaucracy, politics and human motivation, is Shakespeare compared to the books under review here. Plague Tales is best read at 37,000 feet when severe turbulence makes death seem a welcome alternative. On the bright side, these books may give hope to every would be author. There are editors out there who will do their best for you, just as one imagines they have done to get these pages between covers. Would be authors may try, but you may do no worse. Plague Tales is well-named but it is the reader that is victimized.
Rating:
Summary: A perfect first book!
Review: I have not quite finished reading The Plague Tales, but I can tell you this; it is one of the most perfectly written books I've ever read. It compares favorably with Katherine Neville's book The Eight. Both past (1348 Europe) and future (2005 England) are perfectly entwined to make a glorious story. The past is during the time of the terrible bubonic plague and how one Spanish physician (who is actually a Jew) is sent to England to save Edward III and the rest of the royals. The future is where a lady doctor travels from America to England to go on an archaeological dig regarding a future in forensics. What she uncovers is a piece of cloth carrying that old bubonic plague that has been dormant for 600 years and now it mates with an ecoli disease to make a new little baby bubonic plague. I live in Texas where it is currently 100 degrees plus weather every day for several days now. I gripe about how hot it is, and how the air is sucking my breath away. But I will tell you this; I am better off in this hot, breath-sucking weather than those poor folks during the bubonic plague were back in 1348, and I hope our future is never as bad as pictured in 2005. Ann Benson really knows her stuff, and I feel like I'm back in that century of the Spanish physician Alejandro, and even in the future with Janie Crowe. I can hardly wait to read the sequel The Burning Road. After I read it I'll give it an honest review. I just hope it is as good as The Plague Tales, and pray that our own "real" future does not hold in store for us the Biopolice state that the world is in during the year 2005.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty clever tale
Review: Pretty clever tale--great job of interweaving to time periods, the past and the future together. I confess I skipped through a lot of the future to focus on the past. Ms Benson, the love interest for Alejandro killed it; it got boring with that little interjection. But the medical history and the witch Sarah were very fascinating. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this story!
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