Book Review: The Great Trouble

Just finished my second Young Hoosier for this school year! I'm sure many of you are already halfway through them all...just get ready for this book club in October! I bought something years ago I wanted to use and never got to it, so we will be cracking open that box for book club!

The Great Trouble: A Mystery of London, the Blue Death, and a Boy Called Eel

by Deborah Hopkinson

     Eel is a 13 year old mudlark, a boy who scrapes the banks of the Thames for anything to trade for a few coins.  Working all kinds of odd jobs, at the Lion Pub, cleaning animal cages, tidying the tailor’s shop, and loading coffin carts, Eel tries to save up money to help his little brother.  But all the while, trouble follows him.  Fisheye Bill Taylor claims Eel has something that belongs to him, and a manipulative coworker from the Lion accuses Eel of stealing money, forcing Eel to leave the pub.  To make matters worse, people all around him are falling ill with cholera, a disease that kills in a matter of days.  Cholera, the blue death, leaks all the liquid out of a person, causing their lips and skin to turn blue.  In order to keep more people from dying, Eel teams up with Dr. Snow (a real person in history) to find the cause of cholera to stop it in time.  Dr. Snow believes the cause is the water pump on Broad Street, but the duo have a lot of work to do to change the opinion that it is transmitted through dirty air.  Can Eel and Dr. Snow find the cause, stop the water flow, AND avoid Fisheye Bill?

     It's sad, but I didn't even realize this story was historical fiction, and most of it really happened! I tend to know everything :-P but I found out there is something I didn't know.  Dr. Snow was a real doctor that went against common belief that cholera was transmitted via polluted air.  He argued it was a contaminated water supply--he was right.  The Broad Street pump in London was the cause of the cholera epidemic, and through his work, the pump was closed and hundreds of lives were saved.

     This book is a GREAT retelling, albeit fictional tale, of the cholera epidemic in the 1800s.  Eel is a great character, and it is easy to fall in love with him! As long as Florrie does!  The author explains a lot of the history at the end of the story, and I couldn't put it down--I wanted to learn all about it, and I also like comparing the true story with the fictional tale.  This is definitely worth checking out!

And here's the map of London during the cholera epidemic: