Jinks, Catherine. Pagan's scribe.

JINKS, Catherine. Pagan's scribe. (Pagan Chronicles.) Candlewick Press. 368p. map. c2005.0-7636-2022-X. $16.99. SA

This last novel in a four-book series about medieval times, following Pagan's Cruz sade, Pagan in Exile, and Pagan's Vows, is set in Languedoc, in southern France, in 1209. Pagan is now Archdeacon of Carassonne, and because he is shortsighted, he has hired as his scribe young book-loving Isidore, who narrates in the present tense. Pagan has been traveling about the countryside on a mission to convert the Cathars back to the True Faith, without much luck, and at first naive Isidore is privately scornful of his short, dark, often irreverent new master. Soon, however, he comes to appreciate Pagan's fierce intelligence and loyalty, and his political and leadership skills--especially when the Pope sends an army of Crusaders to crush the Cathar heretics, and despite Pagan's best efforts to make peace, the city of Carcassone is besieged. Pagan, his beloved former master the saintly Lord Roland, Roland's Machiavellian brother Lord Jordan, and anxious Isidore, who suffers from epilepsy, are all trapped within the walls as food and water run low and battles rage.

Jinks, a medieval scholar, is also a talented writer, and her tales of Pagan bring the Middle Ages to life, with all the religious fervor, political game playing, superstitions, and gory squalor of that era memorably portrayed. Readers will laugh at Isidore and Pagan's sardonic asides and suffer with them through the terrible siege and the final tragedies. A moving ending to a vivid, gritty historical fiction series. Paula Rohrlick, KLIATT

S--Recommended for senior high school students.

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