Five years after the end of her award-winning Crusades trilogy, Karleen Bradford re-engages the Holy Wars – this time the Children’s Crusade, the last and most tragic of the campaigns.

Along with 20,000 other young people, Angeline has left her village in France to follow Stephen, a shepherd boy with a vision of retaking Jerusalem. Bradford picks up the story in Egypt almost too quickly, with only a glimpse of the horrors along the way. The few who survived their journey have been betrayed and sold into slavery, their faith all but crushed. Stephen is left in deep despair.

However, Angeline soon discovers her situation could be worse. She becomes slave to the emir’s favoured concubine, a woman of grace and learning. Bradford deftly evokes an exotic world of crocodiles and pyramids, silken bowers and scented palaces. Instead of barbarism and brutality, Angeline finds in medieval Cairo a culture undergoing enlightenment, a rich city where Muslims, Christians, and Jews co-exist peaceably. She acquires language and insight.

Bradford’s 15-year-old protagonist struggles for autonomy, fiercely opposing those who threaten it. But Angeline does not come out unscathed. The concubine makes sure Angeline catches the emir’s eye, for that is a slave’s only route to power. Bradford draws a discreet curtain around Angeline’s bedding by the emir, but she is candid about the fact and its traumatic aftermath.

Once again, Bradford’s characters are manipulated by offstage forces that subvert the human qualities of faith, courage, and unselfish devotion to a greater cause. Bradford takes on timely themes of East versus West, Christian spirituality and hypocrisy, and sex and power to show that an open mind, tolerance, and firsthand knowledge are a person’s best defence.