This is not as good as The Pillars of the Earth, but it is still one solid gem of a novel folks. While I wanted more of Jack and Aleina and their mentions made me miss the more, but Caris and Merthin are almost as good. I loved seeing all the parallels between the characters in this book and the characters in Pillars. I also have a teacher who absolutely loves the black plague. She says it's her favourite disease to study so I liked knowing a lot about it before going into the book and learning more. Follett's historical accuracy is admirable in this series. I'm not going to write some long review as I did for Pillars because there's not much more that I can say about this that does not apply to the prequel. While my emotions were not as intense, I loved the characters. I liked that the big villains were related to the protagonists and therefore had some will they/won't they be good tension in the beginning, but I did miss an all-out evil powerhouse like William of Hamleigh, though Ralph was a good substitute. The same can be said for all of the characters. This is one of the few instances where more of the same is good because you can get all the feels and if you want, you could even substitute names for characters from Pillars and it would be like reading au fanfiction written by the author. Ken Follett is great and I'm excited to read the third installment in this series.