It’s in times like this that I go back to Briar’s Book by Tamora Pierce, since it’s incredibly soothing to me. It’s basically a YA/Middle Grades book about an epidemic in a fantasy world, where we see the entire process–the disease’s origins and spread, the effect of social class and public infrastructure, attempts at containment, prevention, and treatment, and the struggle to achieve a diagnosis and cure, through the eyes of an 11-year-old plant mage whose teachers are the herbalists, healers, and administrators who tackle these tasks head-on.
Also a really great reminder that fantasy plots don’t need to be based around war and battle. The whole series is good for that–the characters are students in a temple based around education and public service; the troubles they encounter are usually natural disasters, cultural conflicts, or basic human ills, and violence isn’t glorified.
I just reread it for this reason. It’s an amazing book, if particularly haunting right now. And its rage against a class system that dispassionately kills the poor is astounding in a J fiction novel from 1999
I just got to the part where Frostpine is grousing because someone remembered that he can make charms to protect the ducal guard from a rain of rocks and chamberpots when they go from house to house checking for any cases of disease. He doesn’t want to make them. “A proper fear of such things keeps soldiers polite. Otherwise they might be tempted to push common folk around. Orders to enter people’s homes uninvited are a sore temptation to peacekeepers, I’ve found.”
Crane, the aristocrat, asks him if he has any respect for proper order, and Frostpine says, “Depends on whose idea of order it is.”
DAMN STRAIGHT.
This book has one of my favorite passages of all time, about what makes sickness work tough to live through, when Rosethorn is talking about why she hates plagues:
“Most disasters are fast, and big. You can see everyone’s life got overturned when yours did. Houses are smashed, livestock’s dead. But plagues isolate people. They shut themselves inside while disease takes a life at a time, day after day. It adds up. Whole cities break under the load of what was lost. People stop trusting each other because you don’t know who’s sick.”
