Library hardcover

This is my 3rd Geraldine Brooks book and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Although the characters are fictional, Brooks has steeped her story in the historical context of a 17th century English town that witnesses the devastation of the Plague. Our main character Anna Firth, is the perfect example of how survivors cope as they see spouses, children, and neighbors die of this disease. In one year Anna and her neighbors will question their beliefs in religion and with each other.

Brook's Anna is the main reason that I kept turning the pages for and she guides us in a great story. It was interesting to see Anna develop as the story progressed. Similar to other readers, I wasn't satisfied with the ending this remarkable character was given. My heart demands a sequel!! I also have to mention the sensual scene between Anna and another character in the book. Honestly, it has to be tied with that scene where Meryl Streep has her hair washed by Robert Redford in "Out of Africa." Who doesn't want a man to say " tonight it is all about your needs! Hot damn!


Goodreads review published 28/02/15

1666. A young housemaid walks through the empty streets of a village decimated by plague. She attends to the rector, a formerly charismatic leader now sequestered in his empty house, listless and faithless. The previous year a bolt of fabric from London brought bubonic plague to this remote northern village, and as one by one the villagers began to die, the rector convinced them that instead of fleeing the village and bringing plague to others (who probably would drive them away anyway), they should quarantine themselves and ride it out. As nearly two-thirds of the inhabitants sicken and die, our 18 year old heroine joins forces with the rector and his wife to minister to the living, dying, and dead, and try to prevent the village from descending into superstition and barbarity. At times they succeed more than others, but watching those who rise to extraordinary challenges and those who don’t is compelling entertainment.

At a dinner recently a friend handed this over to me and said, “You should read it — it’s wonderfully written!” She was right — the prose is beautiful, the story gripping, and the portrayal of human nature fascinating. Then (fun coincidence) I was two chapters into the book when another friend brought me to a book reading by Tony Horwitz, this very funny travel writer, who turned out to be Geraldine Brooks’s husband! Who knew?! Well, obviously he did, as did the book store lady who introduced him. So I grabbed a copy of Year of Wonders and asked him to sign it along with one of his own books, which he did without making me feel too ridiculous. He also told me that this was his favorite of his wife’s books. It’s a fast read, and guaranteed to make you feel really good about living in the 21st century. My only problem is with the ending. All through the book a couple of characters display obviously modern sensibilities, but the end really does seem to go off the rails with bizarre plot twists more suitable to a supermarket paperback than good historical fiction. Added to that is the toll on faith that the plague takes — really, nobody’s faith is strengthened after going through this sort of ordeal?? Granted, who knows if mine would be, especially given the absence of plumbing, medicine, or decent food, as well as the cast of illiterate drunkards I’d have to endure, but shouldn’t we at least hope for characters who come through the refiner’s fire wiser and stronger? Other than that, very interesting and beautifully written.

This book is based on the true story of a Derbyshire village where the plague arrived, probably in cloth sent from London, and where the villagers made the brave decision to enforce a voluntary quarantine on themselves so as not to spread the disease to the other villages and towns around. However, the novel doesn't stick to the facts in several important areas, more's the pity.

When the story opens in autumn of 1666, Anna, a young woman, is working as a servant for the rector, who is deeply depressed following the death of his wife and the huge loss of life (half the population) that has resulted from their voluntary isolation. Anna herself suffers from her losses: she had been widowed in a mining accident before the plague arrived and her two young children died of the disease. The lady of the manor's daughter turns up demanding the parson come to see her mother - who she ends up confessing is in labour with an illegitimate child and likely to die - and is sent away in no uncertain terms by the rector, who has lost his faith.

The book then goes back to the time before the plague began, when Anna took in a lodger, a young tailor who sent for cloth to London, unwittingly importing the plague-carrying fleas that causes the whole disaster (although the 17th century characters remain unaware of how plague is transmitted). It then follows through the entire year until it once again reaches the period where the book opened.

There are a few issues as the story unfolds because very few of those who die are developed as characters beforehand, and therefore the reader feels no real connection to them. The continuing deaths become quite repetitive. The story is told in Anna's first person viewpoint and at times there's a somewhat anachronistic flavour in her views of the world, despite the attempt to have her speak in a slightly old fashioned way, with a liberal sprinkling of dialect terms which are never explained and where the meaning is often not ascertainable from the context.

However, those aren't the real problems with the book, which I found a total disappointment. Part of the trouble is that I've read a lot of history books, so certain things jumped out as wrong and derailed my belief in the story. However the entire last sequence is genuinely a car crash, as I'll come on to, but it was prefigured for me early on.

Firstly, the village originally relied for medical help on an old woman and her niece who grew a physic garden and prepared herbal remedies, and also provided midwifery services. The author's idea of these women owes more to Margaret Murray's long-discredited notion that witchcraft was a survival of ancient goddess-worship, rather than the documented evidence about 'cunning folk' as they were known (both men and women). For example, every time her characters pronounce a charm, it has a formula about being pleasing to our grandmothers. The real cunning folk recited charms that were based on Christian prayers.

Secondly, although it might seem 'obvious' to 21st century readers that the plague would be blamed on witches, from what I've read about how it was viewed from the middle ages onward, this wasn't the case: it was seen instead as God's punishment on a sinful humanity, probably because of the occasions in the Bible where He sent plagues, e.g. to the Egyptians. The kinds of illnesses and deaths attributed to witches were smaller scale and without a discernible cause - such as a sudden death (which we would recognise as a stroke, for example) or death after a lingering illness. Plague was recognised as such - as it is in this story - by its 'tokens': the buboes or swellings in the lymph nodes (neck/armpit/groin) and the 'ring-a-roses' under the skin. The sequence where the village turns on its cunning folk and murders them struck me as pure melodrama,  and the author's inclusion of material from a Scottish witchcraft "confession" (as she confirms in her afterword) shows that she hasn't understood the material she researched. It would have been much more salutary to have used the documentation about English witchcraft cases, for example the Pendle witches, as the Scottish and English views on the subject were very different. For most readers I realise this is an academic point, but I almost stopped reading at that point, and the switch from actual drama to melodrama didn't bode well for the rest of the story.

Another odd scene is the one where Anna's son and his friend play with the corpses of black rats. It's true that when infected rats died, the plague-infested fleas migrated to people, but that happened in London and other places where rats brought the disease from ships at the docks etc. Here it arrives in flea-infested cloth from London so there wouldn't be any infected rats to begin with and the fleas didn't need to pop back onto rats in between, considering they gave the disease to the tailor soon enough and his customers ignored the advice Anna gave them to burn the clothing he'd made. It's as if the author read the material about the dying rats - she mentions it in her Afterword - but without understanding the sequence, so didn't realise it wasn't needed here.

The main part of the story deals with the various deaths, Anna's role in nursing the sick and her growing friendship with the rector's wife, Elinor. The two women use a book translated from Arabic into Latin - Elinor reads it although she has meanwhile taught Anna to read and write English - to teach themselves the plant lore lost when the two wise women were murdered. Eventually they manage and Anna also becomes a credible midwife. There's a slightly anachronistic element in their recognition that they need to build up the strength of the younger people who have less immunity to the plague, but that isn't too bothersome. That element of the story is quite interesting even though it comes across as the writer too-obviously showing her research, as does the chapter where the two women go down a lead mine to get an orphaned girl sufficient lead to allow her to hang onto the claim.

However, it is when things really part company from documented history that the car crash I mentioned looms. In short order, there's the improvised crucifixion of Anna's abusive father, followed by the grand guignol madness of her stepmother - dancing crazily in her house around the strung up body of her remaining child, then dragging said corpse to the outdoor 'church' the villagers have been using and attacking the rector, then cutting Elinor's throat and stabbing herself.And in the final section, there's a total rewrite of the rector's character which completely undermines the credibility of the story. I suddenly found I was reading a romance novel: after a wild ride on the moors reminiscent of Wuthering Heights, Anna returns to fall into bed with him, convinced he's the love of her life. It's literally a rude awakening when she discovers he was just getting some sex after deliberately depriving Elinor of the same for the whole of their married life while doing his best to make Elinor as lovelorn and lust-tormented as possible, all to punish her for having performed a do-it-yourself termination which had made her infertile - so hadn't she been punished enough? Granted that he's lost his faith, but it seems he didn't love Elinor anyway, so why did her death send him over the edge? No, after the strong, spiritual, caring side he's shown all throughout the novel, which allowed him to convince the villagers to go along with the quarantine despite their appalling suffering, this was a step too far. The writer would have needed the ability of a George Elliot to make that one believable.

After that ridiculous interlude, the rest is a whistle stop tour where everything bar the kitchen sink is chucked in -  the attempted infanticide by the grown up daughter, of the lady of the manor's illegitimate baby, then Anna's escape with the rejected child helped by the rector who is suddenly nice again, then her being pursued by some member of the l-o-t-m's family who wants to kill both her and the baby, then life threatening storms at sea, escape to a foreign land and finally a life of fulfillment in a harem as one of the wives of an Arab doctor, where a few years later Anna is a doctor to women and is bringing up both the illegitimate baby of the l-o-t-m and her own child by the rector all of which could have constituted a novel in itself but was zoomed past in a handful of pages. Any remaining credibility went out of the window, and a book that had hovered around the 3-star mark despite the earlier clangers about witchcraft and plague vectors dropped to 1-star. A shame, because the subject matter was promising. The real-life story of the rector and his wife - the historical people on whom the characters were based had children whom they sent away before the quarantine, but the wife stayed to help and died of the plague - would have made a touching story, and we would surely have seen a man tested to the ends of his faith but somehow, it seems, still managing to cling onto it. That would have made a more enriching story than something that veered through umpteen genres including body ripper and leaves an unsatisfying impression.

This is the captivating story of the bubonic plague in a small English town in 1665. This is a part of history that should be told!! Written as a novel of historical fiction with a wonderful heroine.

I love this sad yet essentially uplifting story about a town that sacrifices itself by cutting off all travel and communication between their village and the other towns to contain the progression of the plaque.

It is based on true stories and superb writing -- told in the language of the times.


***All time Favorite Books***

I know that this book was based on the history of a small English village that quarantined itself during the Great Plague. Unfortunately, I think it does a disservice to the sacrifices made by those villagers. The message of courage and hope, the search for meaning in the face of suffering that’s implied by the title “Year of Wonders” is mostly obscured, if not completely lost. Of course my view may be overly harsh; I read The Plague by Albert Camus earlier this year and can’t help but compare the two, unfair as that is. One is historical fiction, the other is philosophy. But as studies seeking to understand human nature, one is clearly superior and I found I could not enjoy Ms. Brooks interpretation.

I'd like to entitle this review How I Wish I Liked Geraldine Brooks More and subtitle it (for dramatic effect) How I Narrowly Escaped the Plague.

True story: Last year, right before Labor Day here in the States, our dog became somewhat lethargic and had swelling around his neck. And, though it was hot and the end of August, I was, strangely enough, simultaneously experiencing a sore throat and swollen lymph nodes.

It was the Thursday before the Monday Labor Day holiday (naturally) when I took in our dog and had the vet extract some fluid from one of the swollen spots on his neck. When the vet came back in, he had a weird look on his face and he asked, “Any chance you've been exposed to fleas?”

Well, yes, one of our cats had recently broken free and entered a rabbit warren (which, of course, made me think of Watership Down), killed all of the rabbits, laid them out like a sociopath in the grass in the backyard, and then entered the house with the fleas on his body. I had spent several days combing him and vacuuming the house like Sylvia Plath.

I wondered, why did he ask?

The vet shifted his weight uncomfortably and said, “Well, as you may know, we have confirmed cases of the bubonic plague here, and, between what I'm seeing in the fluid I've extracted, and your experience with the rabbits and fleas. . . it's possible that your dog has contracted the plague.”

Honestly, he could have then knocked me down with a feather pen. I asked, “Is this because I love Shakespeare?” (For real. Maybe it was shock?)

He gave me a light squeeze on my arm (how brave of him to touch me!), and said, nervously, “Um, I'm sure it's nothing, but unfortunately we won't have the lab results back until Tuesday, because it's a holiday weekend.”

So, from THURSDAY TO TUESDAY I wondered if our dog or I or any of the members of our household had plague. THE PLAGUE. Sheesh. It was awful.

Anyway, I'm happy (thrilled in fact) to report that we did NOT have the plague, and we survived, but you can now know my true devotion to books when I share with you that, as soon as we were given the good news that we did not have the plague, the very next thing I thought was. . . those poor people in Year of Wonders weren't so lucky.

I went home, grabbed a copy of the book, took out my notes, and reminded myself that Year of Wonders was a debut novel for Ms. Brooks and it contains some fantastic language. And, obviously, some part of the story stayed with me. I can't think about the plague (though I hope I never contemplate having it again), without thinking of this book.

But, what happens to Ms. Brooks's novels? I've read three of them now, and though they always start with sharp and descriptive and almost poetic language, they all go downhill for me. Crash, in fact, with their bizarre and sloppy endings.

Now that I have faced the possibility of plague, I feel I have developed a kinship with some of her characters. But, still, I hesitate. I wonder. . . why don't I like her books more?

Geraldine Brooks was inspired to write her (2001) Year of Wonders after she saw a BBC documentary wherein she learned that in 1665, during the Great Plague, the Derbyshire village of Eyam decided to quarantine itself. The villagers agreed that no one would leave until the plague had ended, and outsiders agreed to bring food and supplies to the village gates. Many people died, but many more were also saved. We learn of various strategies they tried that helped save themselves, while facing extremist responses as well.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-d...

The first person narrator is Anna Frith, an inspiring young woman who lost her family and became a healer and midwife in the process. She is inspired to hopeful acts of solidarity and love in part by her rector, Montpelier, who leads the village to make this choice.

It is sad, of course, as our pandemic has been for countless thousands:

“My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly. I used to wonder if it was so because the memory of Heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go. This, I thought, must be the kindness that God does for them and for us, since He gives so many infants such a little while to bide with us.”

But the inspiration for us to thrive in crisis comes from her, undefeated even as death surrounds her:

“She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them and gazed at me. 'I wonder if you know how you have changed. It is the one good, perhaps, to come out of this terrible year. Oh, the spark was clear in you when you first came to me - but you covered your light as if you were afraid of what would happen if anybody saw it. You were like a flame blown by the wind until it is almost extinguished. All I had to do was put the glass around you. And now, how you shine!”

I liked a novel on the same period, Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, more, but this is elegantly written historical fiction, just beautiful writing. It has a somewhat surprising ending that seems a little out of character with the dominant tone of the book, but maybe it seems consistent with eighteenth century novels with sudden turns of events and fortunes? At any rate, I still like how it ends. And I like this book quite a bit. Read it with Hamnet and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo about the loss of children. too.

2.5* rounded down because it was ok but I cannot say I liked it.

This review is going to be short because I finished this 4 months ago and I am too behind with my reviews to treat all books equal.

Why only 2*
-tIt started very well with the account of how the plague came to the village and an interesting introduction of the main characters. It then turned into a melodrama who was not really about the plague anymore.
-tThe author struggled so hard to stuff in this book all the themes possible from that period: fear of witches, women struggles, drug abuse, child abuse and even slavery. Every misery-inducing event is present.
-tThe characters soon became unbelievable
-tThe idiotic ending. It does not justify the name of the novel.

I really enjoyed this book right up until the end. I thought the beginning of the book was great. I enjoyed the story, I liked the characters, and found it to be a fast read. Then, the story took a strange turn. I did not like the end at all. I was left scratching my head. But the beginning and midddle of the book made up for the ending IMO.

*3.5* n  God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother’s heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how he can test us so.n

This author is a master at writing atmospheric, and moody stories. The problem with this one, it was incredibly violently graphic in parts and quite depressing. I’m not sure what I was expecting with a novel about the plague.

n  Stanley believed that sickness was sent by God to test and chastise the souls He would save. If we sought to evade such, we would miss the lessons God willed us to learn, at the cost of worst torments after our death.n

What was that ending though??

I have to admit that I have never been a huge fan of historical fiction so this is not the kind of book that I would normally read. Having read several positive reviews and been impressed by the author's credentials, however, I started reading with an open mind. The writing style was very welcoming and drew you in from the beginning and I warmed to the strength of Anna, the protagonist. I felt however that the story became so flawed and was so inconsistently paced that by the final page I had lost all respect for the novel as a whole. If you have not read the book [and still intend to do so] please stop reading for I will probably ruin it for you but the amount crammed into the final 20 pages was so utterly ludicrous that the story completely fell down and you felt like you were reading a piece of creative writing written by a GCSE student who is running out of time in an exam. Within these final pages the [previously rather promising] heroine has a highly charged affair with the husband of her dead best friend, discovers he's something of a psychopath, delivers a baby, rescues the baby from being murdered, runs away from the village she has never left in her life [taking the baby with her], is chased by the babies family, boards a ship and [somehow!] ends up part of an esteemed doctors hareem of wives acting as his assistant and bringing up the rescued child and a bastard child of her own fathered by the psychotic clergyman [widower of her best friend]. Phew! All plausibility is completely lost. I normally have some love for novels which are an easy read and have this degree of originality this, however, is utter rubbish.