I love time travel as a genre, but found this book incredibly boring. If you want to read about the minutiae of living while the Black Death was going around, this is the book for you. If you are interested in time travel, skip this. Other than placing the main character in the past, time travel doesn't play a huge role in the story, and you don't even get much of the fish-out-of-water aspect you often do for stranded time traveler stories since Kivrin is well-educated on the age she was traveling to. 
 I will admit the one star was influenced by what I want out of a time travel story. Absent any of my desires or expectations, it maybe would have earned two stars. Even still, things plod along at a glacial pace. It was only pure force of will that carried me over the finish line on this one.