It is the mid-14th century (1347-1351), and Columbus and the New World haven’t even been dreamt of. In an abbey near Paris, a company of choirboys squabble, study, and complain about each other’s smelly feet. Boys, it seems, are the same whatever the era. But their lives are about to change with the arrival of Micah, a filthy street urchin with an angelic voice. A more terrifying intruder soon follows: the Plague.

Ellis is a Toronto writer whose first YA novel, Looking for X, won a Governor General’s Award. Her second, The Breadwinner, about an Afghan refugee girl, became an international bestseller after Sept. 11. Her latest sets timeless elements of childhood – a hunger for acceptance, a need to rebel and have fun – against a dramatic era in history.

Her narrator, Henri, the smallest choirboy, is sensitive and perceptive, and his observations on abbey life are shrewd. He is well aware that the greed and selfishness of some priests is all the worse in light of their Christian vows. Although his view may seem contemporary, it dates back at least as far as Chaucer. The only false note in this elegantly written tale is the lack of any real sense of religiosity: magic and superstition (a hen, a rosebush, and a cat) carry much more weight in this story than God. While understandable and even appropriate in the present-day climate of multiculturalism, the absence weakens the book.

However, Ellis’s depiction of death on a huge scale is haunting. That the Plague killed 25 million people in four years, as the useful historical afterword informs us, is still difficult to comprehend.