I was truly amazed by the deep connection I felt with the main character in Year of Wonders. Set in a small village in 1666, which unfortunately becomes the epicenter of a plague epidemic, the story follows a woman's journey. It was such a refreshing change to read something so different from my usual choices. Despite the rather intense and stomach-churning childbirth scenes (which definitely made me realize I'm not suited for the health-care field), I was completely hooked and couldn't wait to turn the page to see what would happen next or who would be the next victim of the infection.

Recently, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend an author event where Geraldine Brooks was interviewed by Laura Moriarty. Brooks is not only incredibly smart and articulate but also has a charming sense of style. You can read all about my experience here. (By the way, a photo of her amazing red booties is included!)

Rating: Very Good

Genre:
Historical Fiction

This is the captivating story of a small village in England that found itself quarantined in the fateful year of 1666 due to a terrible plague. Inspired by the true events of the villagers of Eyam, Derbyshire, the novel weaves a fictional tapestry around its characters and their tales. While the author has incorporated some real names, the narrative extends far beyond just the names.

The protagonist, Anna Firth, takes center stage as we accompany her through her harrowing journey. After losing her husband and later her children, her sorrow is palpable. Yet, she rises to the occasion and plays a crucial role in helping her fellow villagers when the plague spreads, causing widespread chaos. The villagers, in a remarkable act of selflessness, agree to self-quarantine to prevent the further spread of the disease beyond their village to other communities.

One aspect that truly stands out in this story is the portrayal of the villagers' panicked responses. Some lose their faith and hope, turning to witchery and other desperate measures. Others believe the plague is God's punishment and start to self-harm in the belief that it will cleanse their souls. It is a powerful exploration of human nature in the face of crisis.

It is difficult for a reader to claim enjoyment when faced with such a serious subject, especially when we are currently experiencing a similar situation in the world. However, I must say that I deeply appreciated the author's ability to展现 the full spectrum of human nature in her characters during this contingency. The writing style is beautiful, although at times I found my mind wandering, perhaps due to the current global quarantine rather than any fault in the writing itself.

I am aware that some of my friends did not enjoy the ending, particularly when one of the important characters reveals himself to be someone completely different from what he seemed or what Anna thought he was. For me, this was a welcome addition that added more intrigue to the tale. If you are brave enough to handle such a subject in these challenging times, this story of quarantine is truly worth reading.

Once before, several years ago, I made an attempt to read this book. I managed to get through about 10 or 15% of it and then unfortunately, I had to put it aside. It wasn't due to the quality of the writing or the nature of the subject matter. At that particular time, compared to what was already in my To Be Read (TBR) pile, it just didn't seem like the right moment.

However, this time around, I read every single word. The first half of the book was definitely at least a four-star experience. Her writing prose skill is truly remarkable. She constructs words and rhythms with the finesse of a master. And when it comes to characters like Anna and several others, she brings them to life in such a way that they feel like real core and soul. Moreover, she keeps them firmly within the context of their "time".

But somewhere around the 45% mark, that "time" fit started to waver. Anna began to deviate from her character's period, epoch, and experience, evolving into a 1750 or 1800 plus type of mental and physical entity. This alteration was to such an extent that, for me, the entire village picture no longer remained on the same "real" page as the earlier parts.

As the story approaches its conclusion and especially in the Epilogue, I found myself thinking that the book was barely a two-star read.

She is indeed a gifted and experienced writer. But her "eyes" and general worldview are evident in all the works of hers that I have read. This is not to the advantage of the individual copy itself, not in the least. It makes her product ultimately much more effusive and "make believe" than what her skill would otherwise produce if she were more objective. Instead, she is subjective and reactive, and this has severely hurt this book.

What dire times these were! And what losses were endured by all in such disease-ridden epochs. It wasn't just the loss of life, but also the loss of connection, liberty, and the structures that support solid mental capacity.

It's a good 3,75 rating for me

I will say right away that I thoroughly enjoyed the book and managed to read it within a couple of days. The story is truly dramatic, yet it is well-balanced in the plot. The tragic and painful events never completely overtake and overshadow the action of the plot. On the contrary, there is an abundance of plot, and in my opinion, this is where the fragility of this book lies. There are numerous stories and sub-stories that ultimately weigh down the plot line.

Anna's life is either unbelievable or at times too hard to believe. Devastated by death, pain, and loneliness, she never seems to break down in despair, a condition that seems a little too much for a human being in this world. I would have liked to know more about the life of the village of Eyam without spending excessive time glossing over the constant passages of the characters and their brief, fleeting appearances in the plot. Rector Michael and his wife Eleanor are the people who disturbed me the most. While they tried to find an appropriate solution to the spread of the plague in the village, they also adopt unclear behavior during the story that is only revealed, not clearly and precisely, at the end.

I would have liked to know more about the witches, the miners, and characters such as the Quaker girl. However, their appearance in the plot did not significantly affect the flow of the story, unfortunately making the whole thing seem absolutely thrown together just to superficially fill in the various events. But we come to the sore point of the book, and that is the ending! It is absurd, pulled out of nowhere, and really not very believable. I closed the book grateful for the wonderful writing of Geraldine Brooks but with a slight bitterness in my mouth for the choice of how to end Anna's story.

A solid blend of history and fiction (based on true events), this novel offers a captivating read.

I devoured this book over the course of two days. The village's despair was palpable, and it truly affected me. In fact, there were several passages that were so heartbreaking that I couldn't help but shed a tear.

Despite the difficult circumstances, the main character, Anna, undergoes a remarkable transformation. From a child bride and widow, she evolves into a strong and resilient woman, a true survivor.

However, I must admit that I found the ending to be rather abrupt. I could sense some of the plot developments before they occurred, and the epilogue didn't seem to add much to the story.

Nonetheless, despite the odd ending, I would highly recommend this novel to all fans of historical fiction. It offers a unique perspective on a bygone era and tells a story that will stay with you long after you've turned the final page.

(Reviewed 11/29/10)

Ah me, I'm afraid I had to reach for the smelling salts many times during Brooks' vivid depiction of the plague's rampage through a small village in central England in 1666. The village's heroic decision to isolate itself to prevent the spread of the Black Death to other parts of the country is a harrowing reality. The characters leap to full-blown life from the author's fertile imagination: preachers, servant girls, noble people who assume the roles of "heavies", Puritans, Anglicans, Ancients, and children. And most vividly drawn are the witches performing both white and black magic.

Like "THE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK", this novel is painstaking in its detailed research. The Plague arrives in the village on a bolt of material a tailor brings from London. The tailor is a lodger with a young widow, the narrator and, naturally, a survivor of the Year of Wonder. Wonder is a many-layered choice for the title: first, it describes the miracle of living through such horrors. But I also suggest it represents the philosophical question, the "why" about suffering that has been asked since the dawn of myth-making.

It didn't take great powers of deduction to guess where the story was headed since Anna opens her narrative after the worst has occurred, and she is attending to the Preacher, strong, silent, and virtuous. However, let me state that this is no Harlequin Romance. Surprises and, yes, wonders, occur before the final page.

But let me return to my queasy stomach and attacks of the vapors. Brooks did her homework all too well: we read about the boils, the blood, and the piteous deaths of children and old folk. It seems the middle-aged often had the stamina to live through or past the epidemic. As if this weren't enough, several other varieties of deaths come to life with sickening verisimilitude. Just a warning, not a spoiler, to keep one of those airplane bags nearby. Childbirths are not omitted, nor are the unique and hideous punishments meted out to those who extorted their fellow man and those innocent women herbalists who were branded as Satinist.

This is not a book for the faint of heart, but it is informative, and its fictions rest on actual happenings during that Fateful Year.

Since much news these days relates to the Covid-19 virus, it presents an opportune moment to draw lessons from history. Geraldine Brooks, the esteemed winner of the Pulitzer Prize, offers a captivating fictionalized portrayal of how a village in England coped with an outbreak of the bubonic plague. Her account provides valuable insights into the challenges and responses during such a crisis.

For those seeking an older novel that is based on eyewitness accounts, Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year" is a must-read. This classic work offers a vivid and detailed description of the Great Plague of London in 1665. It provides a unique perspective on the impact of the plague on society, as well as the measures taken to combat it.

By studying these fictional and non-fictional accounts, we can gain a better understanding of how past societies dealt with similar health emergencies. We can also learn from their mistakes and successes, and apply these lessons to our current situation.

Despite the fact that the vast majority of this story appears to be an unending tide of death and devastation brought about by the Plague, I truly adored this novel.

Admittedly, I have a bit of a weakness for historical novels set in a small seventeenth-century British village, especially those with medical themes and an empowered female protagonist.

However, this story did an outstanding job of integrating period details, creating engaging characters, and depicting a community facing an impossible situation.

I appreciated the ending, although I'll concede that it was rather neatly and quickly wrapped up.

This was by far the best book I've read in months, and it presents a beautiful narrative of how death and misery cannot entirely extinguish the possibility of life's joy and growth.

It shows that even in the darkest of times, there is still hope and the potential for new beginnings.

The author's ability to bring this story to life and make me care about the characters is truly remarkable.

I highly recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys historical fiction or a good story about human resilience in the face of adversity.

I had read a couple of Geraldine Brooks' essays for my Lit Theory class during my graduate school days. Although I wasn't one of those extremely feminist individuals, I really liked what she wrote about women. She portrayed women as strong, independent, and intelligent beings without overly politicizing femininity as a whole. This led me to look forward to reading "Year of Wonders". I was attracted to it mainly because I loved the topic, the time period, and the location. I also believed that Brooks would be able to bring something unique to the story.

However, I was not impressed. Overall, and from an academic perspective, the novel seemed flawless. It had well-developed characters and was grammatically well-written. It had all the elements that readers would expect to find in a novel. But perhaps this was precisely what bothered me. It adhered to all the rules of writing a novel: the protagonists were good, the antagonists were bad. The good people were redeemed at the end, and the bad ones were punished. The scared and ignorant people did horrible things because they didn't know any better; they reacted rather than thought. The women were strong, intelligent, and outspoken, while the men were either enlightened or adhered to the patriarchal hegemony. In the end, the novel showed how the human spirit triumphed over all the bad things that came its way. Brooks did an excellent job with her research, so the locales were vividly described, and she was almost too faithful to historicity.

But in creating this "perfect" novel, she lost something. It didn't feel authentic at all. There were anachronisms everywhere. I found it extremely irritating that the language switched back and forth between modern and early modern (17th century) English. Some of the characters seemed two-dimensional to me (the good were just good, and the bad were just bad, when in reality, a truly decent character would have both qualities - these days, everyone is familiar with the concept of the "flawed hero"). I thought that some of her characterizations and descriptions would have been more suitable for a novel set a century later, not in 1666. She had a tendency to rely too much on idiomatic expressions, which sometimes made the writing seem awkward and the reading rather tedious. I had several moments when I rolled my eyes, and to be honest, I couldn't wait to finish the book - not because I wanted to know what happened, but because I had lost patience with it.

I have to say that I initially liked this book.

However, as I delved deeper, I was greatly disappointed in it.

I approached the book fully aware of the sacrifice made by that village and also knew that when people make such sacrifices, they are abundantly blessed by God.

Regrettably, the latter aspect was completely absent in this book.

It is all too easy to be an onlooker to suffering and assume that one has witnessed the injustice, the loss, and the pain, and that there is nothing more to see.

This not only contradicts everything I believe to be true but also goes against the experiences of people I know who have suffered and the tales they tell of the comfort they have received.

In the not-too-distant history of my own people, there is a tragic tale of daily suffering and deaths of the "will this never end?" variety.

However, unlike the survivors of Eyam, we have their own words about the experience. As one survivor said, "The price we paid to become acquainted with God was a privilege to pay."

Certainly, there must have been miracles in that village as they sacrificed for the good of their people.

Surely God walked with them, and there were wonders.

Unfortunately, none of this was in the book. We are left only with what the author assumes would be the outcome after such a year – a rector who no longer believes and a village that has lost its faith as well.

One can write many things from our atheistic, modern perspective, but when it comes to a village that sacrificed for their fellow man in the name of a God they all believed in, one cannot write and get it right if God is left out.

It omits half of the story, and the most important half at that.

My guess is that those villagers were never the same, but not in the hopeless way the author assumes.

I推测 that for those villagers, they never had to look to the skies and wonder anymore if God was there and if He was listening, because I推测 that for them, all doubt had been wiped away.

They now knew He was there because He had walked with them in their year of wonders.

That was the story I渴望 to hear.

Days of our Lives is set in the year of the plague 1666.

It brings to mind a "serious" The Other Boleyn Girl, yet with fewer torn bodices.

I feel I've reached a saturation point when it comes to historical fiction. They all seem to adhere to the same formula. There's an anachronistically feisty heroine, who is attractive but not conventionally beautiful like the second female lead. She endeavors to hold her contemporaries to a 21st-century moral standard. Readers are startled by scenes depicting how women are treated, religious fanaticism, and the lack of medical knowledge, among other things. Many secondary characters meet their demise. Then add a sex scene and it's done.

There are numerous unbelievable events and characters that, taken as a whole, are simply too hard to believe.

This was a 3-star book for me until the ending, which was completely unexpected. Year of Wonders was recommended to me as Geraldine Brooks' best novel. However, I won't be going out of my way to read more of her works.

I have always imagined that when writers submit their stories to the blank page, those stories - unlike life - are already exquisitely finished, and even if some of their threads creep out of the frame, they only add to the completeness of the composition. This, for me - very subjectively - distinguishes good stories from bad ones.

Geraldine Brooks has composed an interesting and influential composition in the first three-quarters of her novel. However, in the last quarter, she has panicked and lost control of the threads. They have become unraveled, snarled, and lost. Their colors have faded to a dull, indistinguishable gray in the thick layer of dust, and in the end, only thin,可怜的, and可怕的 remnants remain. What was initially conceived and painstakingly crafted until that moment has magically fallen apart. Brooks is one of those authors who are extremely afraid of the end of their story. And in their flight from responsibility for it, they destroy what they have created before.

The plot itself is a precious gift for exploration in historical, social, and psychological terms. A small English village in 1666, in the turbulent era of the Restoration of the monarchy, at the height of the Black Death. The faces of those fighting for survival shine with unbearable intensity, as do all the sharp edges of the era and the environment: Puritan religious reactionism goes hand in hand with primitive daily delusions such as the lack of hygiene, for example; the cruelty, suppressed in daily life and爆发in the midst of the plague, distinguishes everything different under the guise of "heresy"; but also the selflessness and common sense still do not give in.

As I said - a writer's and reader's gift in the first three-quarters. Which, unfortunately, the writer's nerves that Brooks let go of ruined for me through a hasty, absurd, and推翻everything written until that moment and completely idiotic finale. (With the same effect, extraterrestrials could have been added...).