Karleen Bradford’s The Scarlet Cross takes as its backdrop one of the great tragedies of the Middle Ages, the disastrous Children’s Crusade of 1212. While tending his sheep, 15-year-old Stephen of Cloyes has a vision. A stranger comes to him, instructing him to gather the young people of France into an army and recapture Jerusalem from the Turkish Muslims. What makes Stephen’s crusade different from those that failed in the past is that his army of children is to take Jerusalem not with weapons, but with faith alone.

Setting out with a letter the stranger gives him to be delivered to King Philip of France, Stephen begins to spread his message. By the time he reaches the city of St. Denys and the king’s summer court, he has enlisted the support of nearly 20,000 children. When the king denies Stephen’s request for help, he’s crushed, but Father Martin, the village priest, convinces him to lead his army onward even without the king’s support. Heading for the port of Marseilles on foot, the army faces disaster after disaster, and hundreds of children die of starvation. When Stephen fails to produce a miracle at Marseilles, he’s sure that he’s utterly failed God and his followers. But help seems to come in the guise of aid from two French merchants, and the novel ends with the children arriving at the Holy Land, ready to begin the final phase of their journey.

The Scarlet Cross is a prequel to Bradford’s 2004 novel Angeline, and while the new book is certainly a poignant fictionalization of the Children’s Crusade, it’s not quite as powerful as Angeline, which recounts what befalls Stephen and his army following their sea voyage. In some ways it feels as if Bradford felt the need to create a novel that more fully fleshed out the story of the Children’s Crusade, which is sketched out only briefly in Angeline.

This is not to say that The Scarlet Cross doesn’t have its strong points. Bradford wonderfully evokes the dirt, grimness, and poverty of medieval France, and gives readers a real sense of the power of the Catholic Church in Stephen’s world. And she certainly makes her readers truly believe in Stephen’s miraculous vision. But as the Children’s Crusade makes its way across France and hundreds of children die, we don’t quite get enough sense of what Stephen is feeling as he watches his vision crumble. There are moments when we briefly feel how utterly helpless he is, but even these fail to really capture a full sense of devastation.

Perhaps this is a deliberate move on Bradford’s part, to avoid equally devastating her readers, but it makes the novel feel much flatter than it should.