Jeff Hirsch

Twenty years after the start of the war that caused the Collapse, fifteen-year-old Stephen, his father, and grandfather travel post-Collapse America scavenging, but when his grandfather dies and his father decides to risk everything to save the lives of two strangers, Stephen's life is turned upside down.

The Eleventh Plague

Kirsten Simkiss

Normally I am all about some post apocalyptic fiction, but this one was really bland. It was bizarre reading this, a post apocalyptic pandemic situation, in the year of 2020. As far as human nature goes, you don't really get anything new from this book than you would from The Road (except maybe punctuation). The main character is basic and bland, and I found him very difficult to relate to. All of the characters were very one note - either edgy or good - and those extremes made this book very boring because you knew exactly how everyone would behave before it happened.

The pacing was also really odd. The plot of the book happens over the course of only a couple of weeks, but half the book is just the main character questioning how fast their way of living is likely to collapse - and then ultimately brings about the method of that downfall himself because no one can behave like a rational person in a post apocalyptic society apparently.

I can't really recommend this book to you as I skimmed the second half of the book to get through it. All in all, I suggest you give this one a miss.

Maggie Gordon

The Eleventh Plague is about a world destroyed, not surprisingly, by plague, and the remaining people are scavengers just trying to survive. At the start of the novel, Stephen must suddenly fend for himself after his grandfather dies and his father is badly injured during an accident. He joins up with group of strangers who take him to a hidden town that has managed to maintain some semblance of order and safety. However, this isolated village is not as perfect as it seems, and Stephen begins to wonder if he’d be safer on his own.

The main problem with The Eleventh Plague is that it is boring. Books don’t need constant action to be interesting, but they must have some believable tension. Hirsch was trying to portray a very insular community where freedoms were restricted in order to ensure social cohesion, but the stakes never seemed that high. The expectations were pretty low (contribute and don’t be disruptive), and readers were only given one example of a family being banished. Additionally, an adopted Chinese teenager named Julie lived in the town, and she faced mistrust and racism from the community, but not nearly as much as I would have expected given the fact that China unleased the plague. Julie refused to participate in community functioning, and caused a lot of havoc and disharmony by fighting. However, the town let her skip school and do her own thing most of the time. She faced little punishment for her indiscretions, and this is surprising as I would assume that fear and distrust could cause people to react violently to a person that they see as an enemy. Many authors have used isolated villages to really explore the horror of human emotions under pressure, but The Eleventh Plague only brushed the surface of human depravity. For a dystopia, it was pretty lightweight, and there are a lot of better books that deal with the subject in a more nuanced and in-depth manner.

The Eleventh Plague

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