“I placed him, his arms splayed limply. I lay down beside him and drew him close. I pretended to myself that he would wake up in the wee hours with his usual lusty cry for milk. For a time his little pulse beat fast, his tiny heart pounding. But toward midnight the rhythms became broken and weak and finally fluttered and faded away. I told him I loved him and would never forget him, and then I folded my body around my dead baby and wept until finally, for the last time, I fell asleep with him in my arms.

In the morning I gathered him to me. I gathered him up off the gory pallet and ran into the street. My neighbors were all standing there, their faces turned to me, full of grief and fear. Some had tears in their eyes. But the howling voice was mine.”

The emotional impact of what she had written down hit me in the first few pages. I had not intended to read this book yet; i only came to look, but then I couldn’t look away.

I thought of how it must have been to have found yourself alive when most of those whom you have loved and cared for had died, and you had watched it all. The dying must have settled in like a cold winter’s night or maybe it felt like nothing at all. Perhaps, you didn’t know what you were feeling after a while. Your prayers, if you gave them, went unanswered. If you had asked for forgiveness, it didn’t come. Then maybe after a while there were just no more prayers in you to give.

This was also a time when all you had left was memories, and maybe these memories are something that you wish you didn’t have, maybe you wish that they had been wiped out along with the plague. Then there was the silence of the dead; It was deafening to wake up each morning with that silence in you head or to dream that you were holding your loved one in your arms, and then waking up to find nothing was there. There are just some things that life brings to us that should never have happened.` And all you can hope for is someday thinking of it as all a bad dream.

“It is natural to want to forget, Anna, when everyday is a brimful of sadness. But those souls also forgot those that they had loved. You do not want that, surely? I have heard some preach that God wants us to forget the dead, but I cannot believe so. I think He gives us precious recollections so that we may not be parted entirely from those He has given us to love. You must cherish your memories of your babes, Anna, until you see them again in Heaven.”

Rounded up from 4.5

Jedna od mojih prvih "uredničkih" kupovina... neposredno posle Harija Potera... Odličan roman o crnoj smrti, ili kugi u Engleskoj... Nažalost, objavljena je u pogrešnoj ediciji i nije joj posvečena adekvatna pažnja... ali potražite je u bibliotekama... A još bolje, pročitajte je u originalu ako ste u mogućnosti...

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This is a novel based on a historical event that occurred in the 1600’s in Eyam, England. It was the Era of the Plague, bubonic plague. This author builds a very readable story while educating us about how life was back then. You get a very real sense of the church’s influence on the daily life of the people living in a little village in rural England. You also get a glimpse of the villagers’ superstitious belief systems: something or someone must be blamed for the spread of this awful illness that snuffs out the life of two thirds of the inhabitants. While the story line is terribly unpleasant, the protagonist wins your heart with her resourcefulness and faith. She was a common servant girl; the author has endowed her with traits the make her so likable and before her time. In addition, the language is particularly beautiful and reminiscent of a by gone era. I think this story had wide appeal to most readers.

n  Review originally published November 2014n

Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders describes the 17th-century plague that is carried unknowingly from London to a small village by a traveling tailor. One by one, the villagers begin to die and the living face a choice: do they flee their village in hopes of outrunning the plague or do they stay? The difficult decision to stay is made and so the year-long journey with the plague begins.

The self-quarantined villagers struggle to retain their humanity while they fall into the disease, and descend into despair, along with the inevitable superstitions that come along with a disaster like this and in this time period…although it is still common to have major devastation blamed on an angry God.

The characters are rich and believable. Maiden Anna Frith, the narrator, is a widow with two young sons. The rector, Michael Mompellion and his wife, Elinor, work closely with Anna and are instrumental in their attempts to keep the village together during these very dire and uncertain times.

I found myself thinking of the current Ebola pandemic and how, after hundreds of years of dealing with plague and disease, we still struggle with our attempts to contain them. Reading about plague can be quite heartbreaking, but I was fascinated with the measures that were taken to contain the plague in such primitive circumstances. Not to mention knowing that those people didn’t have the benefit of advanced medical training, or means to communicate their plight to anyone beyond their own village.

I will say that the book started out a bit on the slow side for the first several pages, but stick with it!

Brooks has a beautiful way of writing and I know you will be as impressed as I was with her use of the language; the way she was able to capture and describe so vividly the very human struggles of these people in that century. While this book is a historical fiction work, Brooks was inspired by an actual town commemorated as Plague Village because of the events that transpired there in 1665-1666. To see more on this fascinating subject, visit www.eyam-museum.org.uk.

Copies of The Year of Wonders can be found in any of our La Crosse County library locations at Onalaska, Holmen, Bangor, Campbell, and West Salem, which are all a part of the Winding Rivers Library System. This book comes in regular print, large print, audio CD and e-book. Please check out our website at www.lacrossecountylibrary.org for catalog resources or for upcoming programming schedules. Please visit us on Facebook as well!

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Wow! This one is a solid Wow. Love the voice most of all. It captures the time period just enough as to not overpower the prose and yet enough to totally immerse me in the Fictive Dream. The point of view character is in first person and mostly told in narrative and not in scene. Which doesn’t matter because of the great voice in the prose that I clung to like a sailor, months at sea on a life raft desperate for water. I couldn’t get enough of this book that ticks all the boxes for me a great historical that is definitely going up in the top five books of the year.
The author writes with such authority the question of credibility is moot. The words and sentence structure of the time period are wonderful. I don’t know how the author accomplished it with such command of story and character. An absolute wonderful book.
For those readers who crave more of McCammon’s Mathew Corbett books, Speaks of The Night Bird and Queen of Bedlam, this book is McCammon but with more intense prose.
David Putnam author of The Bruno Johnson series.

Year of Wonder by Geraldine Brooks. This book goes through the plague of 1666 that hit a small village outside of London. It goes through abuse of women, witch killings, superstitions from that time. Lots of death of good and noble people. I went through the audio version. At times it sounded like I was listening to a play. Other times it sounded like a reader was just fake. Took a lot from the book. The monolog of Anna was in short words. Short sentences that were difficult to follow. The book was just odd.

"Good yield does not come without suffering, it does not come without struggle, and toil, and, yes, loss. Each one of you has cried for the crop blighted by drought or pest. Cried, as you did what you knew you must, and ploughed each plant under, so that the soil could be renewed in the hope of the better season coming. Cry now, my friends, but hope, also! For a better season will follow this time of Plague, if only we trust in God to perform his wonders!"

Perhaps only the deeply religious or the deeply deluded (some might say both . . . ), could refer to a plague year as a year of wonders, yet for Anna Frith, 1666 becomes just that. While still grieving her own losses, she is forced to become a savior to her village, where dread and desperation as the deadly disease visits each household, has turned to fear and superstition among the townsfolk. Accusations and mistrust run rampant as the sufferers try to determine if the plague is God's test of faith, or evidence of the Devil's work on Earth.

Anna is not convinced it's either.

Isn't it great to have a rational, thinking heroine who reads!

When I have a tallow stub, I read until it gutters . . . For the hour in which I am able to lose myself in someone else's thoughts is the greatest relief I can find from the burden of my own memories.

This was Brooks' first book - I still consider it her best. The novel held me just as rapt as it did when I first read it over ten years ago.

4.5, rounded down.

I bought a hardcover copy of this when it was first published in 2001, but never got around to reading it ... but it seemed an appropriate time to do so, during our current plague year. Unfortunately, I couldn't even find my own copy now, so downloaded a library eBook copy instead! Nevertheless, I found most of it fascinating and involving, especially descriptions of what is now called 'social distancing', and other modern parallels. Based on the scant historical record of an actual small village in the UK, Brooks embellishes those sources with exciting set pieces following a handful of characters as they either succumb or triumph over the disease. I particularly liked how obscure contemporaneous words and expressions were judiciously peppered through the text, lending verisimilitude.

Two things prevented me from bestowing a full five stars: first, the novel is bookended with chapters taking place in the year following the main action - and by the time we returned to 1666, I had forgotten much of what had transpired in that first chapter (not necessarily the fault of the author, as of my own 'mind like a sieve'). Secondly, the last 40 or so pages that occur well after a satisfying climax, descend dangerously into 'chick lit' territory, with a forced romantic encounter that caused a few guffaws with its out of place 'sex scenes' (sucking of fingers is featured prominently!). The book would have been better served without these, as well as an epilogue set in the Middle East, that is there more to establish the tale's feminist bona fides, rather than any necessity of wrapping up the story.

Annus mirabilis

In 1666, the bubonic plague struck England. Geraldine Brooks based her fictional novel on the true events of a small town Eyam in northern England. Two third of the people died that year, most notably the young.

Based on a real preacher and his wife’s attempt to keep the town’s people from losing their reason, their stable heads drive the story as told by a young woman, Anna’s point of view.

During a time when women were suspected of being witches and outed, often wrongly, by the water test or the high degree of uneducated people making rash decisions, the story literally bounces from one disaster to another.

Brooks writes a skillful story. All three main characters are believable and their attempts to save the town are admirable even with failures.

Sometimes though one questions how much fiction was used for a better story? Anna befriends a woman who teaches her about using herbs for medicine during a time when doctors were not well talented in saving patients. Maybe true.

The preacher’s wife was well educated in her Latin and used a historical medical book based on an earlier Arabic manuscript. Somehow in a small town this seemed more far fetched but I gave it the benefit of the doubt. The townspeople were dropping like flies and any help was needed.

As the title suggests, the time frame for the novel spans a year. The story drives on from bad to worse although hope is always front and centered. Religion and spiritualism clash with almighty death.

And then the ending takes a turn for the unbelievable. Almost to undo the solid storyline, it goes from a predictable love story to just plain “what happened”?

I will give it a 3.5 because it was a good read but not for the ending.

Days of our Lives set in the year of the plague 1666.
It reminded me of a "serious"The Other Boleyn Girl with fewer ripped bodices.

I think I've reached a saturation point with historical fiction, they all seem to follow the same formula. An anachronistically plucky heroine, who is good looking but not conventionally beautiful like the second female lead, who struggles to hold her contemporaries to a 21st century moral standard. Readers are shocked with scenes about how women are treated, religious fanaticism, lack of medical knowledge, etc. Lots of secondary characters die. Add sex scene. Done.

Lots of unbelievable events and characters that, as a whole, are too difficult to swallow.
This was a 3 star book for me till the ending, which came out of left field. Year of Wonders was recommended to me as Geraldine Brooks' best novel. I will not be going out of my way to read more.

3 stars