Review of All Fall Down by Sally Nicholls

A deadly contagion races through England...

Isabel and her family have nowhere to run from a disease that has killed half of Europe. When the world she knows and loves ends forever, her only weapon is courage.

The Black Death of 1349 was the deadliest plague in human history. All Fall Down is a powerful and inspiring story of survival in the face of real life horror.

I am a huge fan of history, as a kid I re-read Terry Deary's Horrible Histories so many times that the pages started falling out. It's always been an obsession of mine. However, when you go through my read shelf, you read don't see that many YA Historical books. Why is that?

Well, this book perfectly illustrates some the problems that historical novels seem to struggle with. While the first half of the book was a bleak picture of life in a village near York, during the Black Death of 1349, the latter half struggled to know where to go with this.

A big problem was the village being set near York, the author clearly felt that you couldn't have a whole book without actually going to York (which I have been to many times, it's lovely but don't go in August), so she had to find a way to shoehorn that in. Which just didn't work.

The character introduction of Thomas was too late in the book to make much sense and his entire storyline felt more like a strange Dickens story. Then the author realised that you can't just leave the village so had to find a way to go back to it within 50 pages. This left the ending feeling rushed, elements quickly shoved in to try and show off their knowledge of the plague and overall, I left feeling dissatisfied.