Plagues I Missed

I am glad I missed the meth plague. And REALLY glad I didn't miss A Plague Year by Edward Bloor. I never really thought too much about meth. The first time I remember hearing about it was back in 2004. I was in Altoona on business and a co-worker and I went into a Walmart late at night and my co-worker pointed out a very sad looking individual moving through the aisles of the store. The woman was very, very thin. She was so thin that she looked really, really sick. Her hair was long and didn't look well, parts of it had come out or broken away, closer to her scalp, but a lot of it hung down to her shoulders. She looked as if she had been beaten up, her eyes sunken back into her head, red wounds or sores on her face and she was missing a couple of teeth. I remember just thinking she looked so, so, so sad. She looked like she was in so much pain. I smiled at her, since I pretty much smile at everyone, and she gave a smile back.
When my co-worker and I were a couple aisles away he said, "Meth, man."
I said, "Dude, what?" (we talked like that, honestly!)
"Meth, man. That chick was on meth."
"Dude, what's meth?"
"Man, it's like all over the place in the country, man. It's a drug and you make it out of, like, cleaning products, dude." "Dude. How do you know?"
"Dude I read about it in Rolling Stone last year, man. It's, like, in all the small towns and stuff, it was in the midwest and then creeped over here, man."
"No way, man."
"Yeah."
"Dude."
And the more we looked, the more we saw, what we thought were anyway, meth users. I didn't think too much about meth until I came across the Faces of Meth website a few years ago and then again when I read Glass.
Long intro to my review of A Plague Year, which is a really, really good book.
It wasn't exactly what I thought it would be. I thought it would focus more on meth addiction and maybe that the main character would get involved with drugs, etc. In short, I guess I thought it would be predictable. But it wasn't, at all. It is a coming-of-age story with a war in the backdrop. Kind of like how Gone with the Wind isn't JUST about the American Civil War. And The Sound of Music isn't JUST about the Nazis taking over Austria. And Cabaret isn't JUST about the Nazis coming to power. Yeah. It is a really good look at life in a small, rural town in Pennsylvania during a war with drugs. There is loss, there is horror, but life continues on and the mudane exists with the dramatic.
Great book and would be Newbery material, except...you guessed it....it is probably just too good.