This week I’ve been pre-reading At the Sign of The Sugared Plum by Mary Hooper, and I started knitting up a cabled-yoked cardigan for Junebug.

The book is about The Plague in London during 1665 and I couldn’t tell from the reviews whether or not it would be appropriate to include on our literature list for school.  Some reviewers have said that it’s too graphic for young children, others have said that it’s just fine and that it paints a vivid picture of seventeenth-century London and The Plague itself.  I can’t pass up such a possibility, so I ordered the book in order to form my own opinion:

However, given that it’s written for the middle-school crowd, I read it with pencil in hand to mark passages that I will omit when I read it out loud to the girls.  I’m of the opinion that an eight year old and a five year old girl don’t need to hear about prostitutes, the king’s mistresses, or wallow in any romantic passages.  I will leave out seven different selections throughout the book.

There’s a sequel to the book, Petals in the Ashes, that deals with The Great Fire of London which happened in 1666.  I’m thinking of buying it as well.