Please note: this review does not include a star rating, as I have seen that the NetGalley version predates a lot of editing/proofreading. I think that had I read a more finalised version of this book, I would have enjoyed it much more.

I jumped at the chance to read this book. I grew up in Derbyshire, frequently visiting Eyam, and I loved the idea of reading a historical fiction set in the famous plague village. Even today it’s a fairly morbid place, with signs on each house listing who died from the plague there, and a museum filled with plague-ridden wax figures.

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If anything, though, my prior knowledge and interest actually hindered my enjoyment of this book, as it was less of a fiction-set-in-Eyam and more a slightly-fictionalised-historical-account-of-Eyam. Not only are all of the characters real people, but you get the sense that every single person had to be accounted for. So many people either appear or are mentioned in the book that it felt like every name on the 1666 parish register got a look-in. While this did help to underline the devastation the plague had on the village, it also crowded the story and made it difficult to connect to our main characters. This also wasn’t helped by the fact that everyone had the same name. Obviously this wasn’t the author’s fault – there were only so many names to go around in 17th Century rural Derbyshire – but it made it incredibly difficult to keep track of who was who. I felt like I spent so much time trying to work out which Elizabeth was which that I was pulled out of the story.

I appreciate what the author was trying to do here, and I commend her for trying to bring the full depth of this tragedy to the forefront, but as a result we lost the opportunity for plot, or satisfying character arcs. (I don’t mind which one of those we get – a strong character-led story needs very little plot, if any.) The sections which did delve into the character of our three protagonists were very good, and I would have loved to see much more of them.

The three perspectives, while a little tricky to follow at times, worked well, and I did really like that the author took this opportunity to tell the stories of three women whose work was vital to their village community. That being said, we had new perspectives being introduced at the eleventh hour, with the last two chapters (and last two alone) being from completely new perspectives. Why not finish the book on one of the perspectives we have had all along? If needed, we could always have had an epilogue.

This book had so much potential, there were glimpses of a really great book but unfortunately the overall read did not come together as I had hoped.

I received a free copy of this book for review. All opinions are my own.