This was a really good novel based on the true story of a remote English village which chose to isolate itself when visited by the Bubonic plague. The main character Anna was inspiring given all that she herself went through as well as the cast of flawed and despairing villagers.

Anna exhibits bravery, courage and determination. During this 'Year of wonders' she learns to midwife, learns to use herbs, even attempts lead mining, simply because there is no-one else to do it.

‘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 first you 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 round you. And now, how you shine!’ -this from her friend and mentor...

The book ends on a high note once the plague and crisis had passed.
This book is Recommended.

I would have given this a higher rating if not for the strange ending.

I live a few miles away from the Derbyshire village of Eyam where it all happened.

http://www.beautifulbritain.co.uk/htm...

Just thought I'd throw that in!

Year of Wonder offers a you-are-there account of the plague year of 1666 in the English countryside, seen through the eyes of Anna Frith, a young maid, widowed with two young boys.


Geraldine Brooks - image from Mondoweiss

The inspiration for the story is the actual village of Eyam, in Derbyshire. After it was clear that the plague had set up shop in their village, the residents elected to voluntarily quarantine themselves for the duration. Eyam is the only locale known to have taken on such a selfless burden. And so it is with the fictitious village here. As residents die in increasing numbers Rector Mompellion pleads with them to willingly confine themselves to the borders of their village, lest they carry the contagion abroad. Most agree, and remain.


In Eyam, services were held in the open air…and families stood apart for each other in order to avoid the spread of infection - image from BBC.com

Brooks shows the stages of the contagion, from the first plague death, a boarder in Anna’s home, to the clear spread of pestilence to increasing numbers of residents, to the hysteria of the ignorant, looking for someone to blame. The payload in Year of Wonders is the up close and personal look Brooks offers of what it was like to live through the Black Death, both in glimpses of the physical travails suffered by plague victims and in the impact of the steep population reduction on the functioning of society.

The late 17th Century was the era of The Restoration. Charles II was the king. The Cromwell era had come to an end, and Puritanism was losing its’ hold on the population. This tension appears in the Year of Wonders as characters move from a strictly drab wardrobe to one with some brightness, the town adjusts to the change from a Puritanical cleric to one with a less severe view of human nature. We also see the very harsh struggle of believers with their faith. How could a loving God allow such an abomination as the plague? Brooks captures some of the madness of the time as a pre-scientific view of causality leads some villagers to scapegoat women who were healers, seeing in their knowledge a power that was inexplicable and thus unacceptable. A clear case of “Ignorance is Power” that persists to this day.


From the Eyam museum - “Elizabeth Hancock had no choice but to drag each of her children to a field next to the family farm and bury them.”

The payload is the thing here, the close look at the time, the plague, The Restoration. But the way one delivers that material is via characters and story. The book reads fast. It is engaging and interesting. But Anna Frith seemed to me a character drawn with a very 21st century sensibility. She is a feminist heroine, overcoming the limited choices of 1666, using her superior intelligence, and working in a dose of entrepreneurialism to boot. While there may have been elements of scientific curiosity extant at the time, it is doubtful that those currents would have flowed as far as remote English mountain villages. Thus Anna and Elinor’s (the rector’s wife) sense that good nutrition, to be obtained through the wise application of natural herbs, was a way to combat illness seems unlikely. The attitude of Anys Gowdie (an herbalist and healer) towards sexuality also seems remarkably modern for 1666. I have found that in some books with a feminist theme (or even most mixed gender TV commercials showing married people, for that matter) there is a lot of oversimplification. Women good, men bad, or stupid. Yes, I know that in Year of Wonders there are evil females as well, and there were plenty of bad men to go around, but the only truly good (as far as we know), liberated man (George Viccar) gets whacked early on. No, Sam (Anna’s late husband) does not count, being rather a simpleton. And after portraying the rector so positively throughout (Yes, I did note the signal tantrum) it seems a cheat that she consigns him to the evil-men pile.

There were hints of bodice ripping in the earlier chapters that made me wonder if I had inadvertently picked up a romance. Thankfully that abated.


Image from the BBC - George Viccars was Eyam’s first victim of the plague - he died…on 7 September 1665”

Anna Frith is allowed to make some errors of judgment, but it seems that this is only to offset her general perfection. She is almost too-good, too-strong, and I confess that this got on my nerves a bit. She lands on her feet so consistently that she might have been a centipede. So, while I did enjoy the book, and learned a bit about the time (always welcome), I had issues.

If you want to learn some more about The Black Death, you might want to check out In the Wake of the Plague. Medieval historian Norman Cantor looks at an earlier (1348-1350) plague and examines the societal and historical impact. Good stuff.


=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, FB, Twitter, and GR pages

Items of interest
-----Definitely check out this article from the BBC about the village Eyam - Eyam plague: The village of the damned - by David McKenna
-----Wiki on The Restoration
-----History.com - The Black Death

This is a book about the bubonic plague so I am basically expected this by the end:



Spoilers abound below along with a not insignificant amount of profanity:
So, expecting this book to be bleak, I shunted all of the emotions I anticipated feeling into the area of my heart where I keep my New York Mets fandom. You know, these guys:





Sufficed to say their years of incompetence and disappointment have formed a nice level of scar tissue over that part of my metaphorical heart. So whatever this book was going to throw at me I knew it wouldn't sink its emotional claws into me.

That being said, fuck this book. It was a never ending parade of despair, death, exploitation, inhumanity, and suffering with a little dash of hope thrown in every so often to make the subsequent despair, death, exploitation, inhumanity, and suffering that much worse. I swear, the town this takes place in (based on an actual town, Eyam) must have killed the writer's grandmother considering the amount of suffering she heaps upon the inhabitants. If I wanted this level of depression I would just read a non-fiction book about the plague.

Look, I understand that this book was about a horrible situation. The town voluntarily (and, might I had, quite nobly) secluded itself from the outside world once it was clear they were infected with the Bubonic plague (not the Black Death vintage, but one of the later outbreaks called The Great Plague of London). And yes, under those conditions some pretty terrible stuff will (and did) happen.

My issue with this book, though, was how the author presented the situation. Like I said, it was a never ending parade of death and despair. I was often introduced to families with the preface that they had already lost X amount of children plus one or both of the parents. I can feel bad for them on an abstract level, but if I didn't know them before hand it is difficult for me to rouse much emotional connection with them. They are just another set of future (or existing) corpses that I shouldn't bother getting to know or care about.

There are a few characters we get to know quite well.

Anna, the narrator. A peasant women in the employ of the local rector and widow to a local miner with two children. Michael Mompellion, the local rector and moral backbone of the community who proposes the the self quarantine. Elinor Mompellion, the wife of Michael who is a (positive) force to be reckoned with. Extremely empathetic, very hands on when it comes to problems, and generally a wonderful woman.

We are also introduced to some other characters as well: Anna's father and step-mother, the Gowdies (a Aunt/Niece pair who have extensive herblore) and the Bradfords (local well to do family).

So, some of the terrible things that the author heaps upon the reader:
-The lynching of the Gowdies because people thought they were witches. There goes just about all of the herblore for the village, forcing Elinor and Anna to learn everything on their own.
-Drug abuse (poppies in this case)
-Child abuse
-A crude form of crucifixion of Anna's father after he tries to kill someone in order to claim the victim's goods as payment for digging a grave (the previous person who did that died of a heart attack from overwork, another cheery note).
-Anna's step mother, Aphra, going crazy from grief both from losing her own children (yes, lots and lots of children die) and having her husband die from the aforementioned crucifixion after Anna does not go to free him (she expected Aphra to do it but Aphra was at her home taking care of her children who all came down with the plague in shortly after the crucifixion). Aphra begins to masquerade as the ghost of one of the Gowdies, selling people fake supernatural remedies.
-Child sacrifice
-Families felled in such numbers that the village runs out of consecrated ground
-Despair that drives some folks to self-flagellation
-Attempted infanticide
-Unnecessary mention of the slave trade. Not because the practice didn't occur, but because of all the other terrible things that have happened why include yet another terrible aspect of humanity during this time on top of everything else as part of a throw away line?
-Elinor, whom we know at the beginning of the book is dead, comes down with the plague. So while you expect her to die she makes a recovery. Sounds good right? Nope, she gets killed when Aphra goes even crazier and stabs her to death in front of what is left of the village.
-The Rector, Michael, after being a pillar of strength for the community, is broken by the death of Elinor and loses his faith (can't really blame him for that). But after hooking up with Anna (biblically speaking) he reveals that he never had sex with Elinor as a punishment for her sin of killing her out-of-wedlock child in the womb (using a heated iron brand no less). He specifically said that he strove to make her love him more and more so that his withholding of sex would hurt her that much more. Talk about a stone hearted, crazy religious zealot son of a bitch. Of course, because Anna become such good friends with Elinor and we see how great of a person Elinor is, this comes off as even more depressing and is a complete 180 from his previous personality to the point where it felt very jarring.

So like I said, this book was fucking bleak. Everyone I was introduced to ended up dead, crazy, or deeply emotionally scarred (or were just terrible people to begin with). By the end we were left wwith this:



Yes, the ending was sort of happy (if you ignore the mountain of corpses you had to climb over to get there), but Michael's crazy genes got passed on to another generation and the happiness lasted all of three pages before the book ended.

There are ways to write bleak, depressing stories that don't involve constantly hitting the reader over the head with all the terrible things happening. After the third or fourth family is wiped out by the plague, the marginal emotional impact of each subsequent family death is extremely low. By the time I was halfway through the book every terrible thing the author dumped on poor Anna or the village just elicited a heavy sigh, not unlike the sighs I utter when the Mets once again find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Upon final analysis this book failed for me because I did not resonate emotionally with any of the characters and the never ending parade of death and destruction just sort of numbed me to the entire experience. Family of seven wiped out by the plague? How passe. Drowning a baby? Par for the course. Crazy lady with a giant knife that slays the most beloved character in the village? Not terribly surprising. Religious man turns out to be a heartless self-righteous jackass? Certainly surprising, but completely undercuts any good feelings I had towards him this entire book.

If you are interested in seeing a community collapse and die off from a plague and their own inhumanity, you might like this book. The writing and descriptions are quite sharp and well crafted, just expect a windmill full of corpses by the end.

In 1666, several residents of the village of Eyam in rural England contracted the plague. Under the influence of their charismatic minister, they decided to self-quarantine in order to prevent the plagues spread. Author, Geraldine Brooks became intrigued by this story. She learned that one of the survivors was the minister's servant and wrote a fictionalized account of the quarantine year from her point of view.

The first 250 pages capture the period well and are a moving account of people in crisis. It chronicles the range of human responses from noble to mob hysteria. However, the author shifts gears in the last 50 pages and the book ends in an improbable melodramatic fashion. It was a real disappointment
as the story held so much promise.

I enjoyed this a lot, but with some reservations. First of all, I knew the basic story very well from Jill Paton Walsh's wonderful children's novel "A Parcel of Patterns", so in a way, I didn't feel I was coming fresh to the book.

Secondly, I felt the narrator was a bit of a Mary Sue, in that she seemed to me--a rabid historical fiction fan as a teenager--to be an idealised version of what we think we'd like to have been like if we'd lived in the past. Maybe that's unfair on the author--someone else who listed this on goodreads characterised it as a slight imposing of modern sensibilities on the character, and I think that's part of the problem. Still, almost impossible to avoid in historical fiction, I would hazard a guess.

Another reservation was that I felt that the action got way too ramped up towards the end of the novel. I know that superstition and ignorance and fear led to people doing diabolical things during the plague era (not that much has changed!) but it got too over the top for me.

SPOILERS

The death of Elinor also made me giggle. I mean, it was brutal and visceral (and extremely unlikely, I'd have thought), but when she fell to die poetically on the luscious blooms she had just conveniently carried to church (never having done so before) and then dropped to the ground--well, really.

And I didn't buy for one second the grief-deranged minister--who had never had sex with his wife, so presumably was a virgin, given his pre-spouse's-murder extreme piety--suddenly

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks is so realistic that I felt I was back in 1666 during the plague. The well developed characters and the multiple situations that come up all would be similar to what would happen but written so perfectly that it was almost like reading a diary! So incredible! Well done!

There are some pretty disturbing sections in the book, once the plague arrives in the village. Will say more once I've had a chance to mull.
By the way, I did know how this was to end beforehand, so I felt a bit odd about where Anna ended up, but I could kind of stretch my imagination to meet her there. Midwife yes, since she'd been helping women in her village, out of necessity, the rest, hmmm, have to think about that for a while.

Year of Wonders tells the story of Anna, a servant to a pastor, and how she emotionally and physically survives the plague while the majority of her village falls ill around her.

I was enthralled. I listened to the audiobook on my daily commute and it was fantastic.

You get the very real drama of life in a small village mixed with the the despair that must have accompanied the plague. There's finger-pointing, people taking advantage of other's need and, above all, the need to rationalize why all of the deaths were occurring.

My favorite part of this book was when Anna stopped in the middle of her hectic life to reconsider how she viewed God. She uses common sense reasoning to pick apart why a deity would allow such tragedy to occur and then wonders why the young are taken rather than the old.

She comes to the conclusion that what's happening is a biological thing rather than a divine thing. Then, once she has that straight in her mind, she's better equipped to handle everybody else's irrational responses to the plague without being bogged down by her own.

Anna is a great heroine. She has her flaws- a flirtation with opium addiction to dull her grief and a crush on someone else's husband- but she tries to be a good person. Mainly, she's just overwhelmed by what's going on and wants to feel loved and safe.

She cares for the ill, helps an orphaned child hold on to her family's lead mine and tries to help her village keep body and soul together.

The ending of Year of Wonders was incredibly shocking to me, but in a good way. Geraldine Brooks stayed true to her characters but took the story in such an unexpected direction, that I had to turn it off for awhile to absorb what I had just heard.

Highly recommended for book clubs or people who love historical fiction. Year of Wonders is wonderous indeed.

It's been two years since making the journey to Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague with a dive bar book club I belonged to (try discussing literature on Karaoke Night. It doesn't work out well). Between rounds of hefeweizen, I recall being memorably transported to another place and time and returning with a far greater affinity for Brooks than most of my fellow drinkers/ readers.

The novel opens in the spring of 1665 in a village based on Eyam in the hill country of the English Midlands. So begins a first person account of young widower and mother of two Anna Firth, who boards a room to a tailor named George Remington Viccars. In any other time period, the handsome and successful tailor, well-liked by Anna's sons, would probably end up happily wed to the widow, but as the subtitle indicates, this ain't that kind of novel.

After receiving a box of fabric from London, Mr. Viccars begins to exhibit symptoms of the Bubonic Plague. He burns his personal effects but upon his death, clients arrive and insist on taking possession of their merchandise. Fever spreads through the village, striking those closest to Anna first. The outbreak is blamed on two herbalists, Mem Gowdie and her young niece, Anys, who are accused of being witches. A mob kills both women, Mem dying from exposure after being dunked in water, Anys hanged. This leaves the town without a physician as the plague strikes.

The young rector of the village Michael Mompellion proposes a quarantine to prevent the disease from spreading through the countryside, which everyone agrees to except a family of wealthy local gentry, the Bradfords, who promptly flee. Anna goes to work for the rector and with his wife Elinor, use what the Gowdies left behind to assume the roles of village herbalist. As the graveyards fill, Anna contends with her estranged father and nefarious stepmother who descend into criminal activity and madness as the plague intensifies.

I was swept away not only by Brooks' writing style -- vivid, sensual, terse -- but also the way the author mined historical data. Instead of telling the reader about various aspects of the village, its residents or how they responded to the plague, Brooks takes the reader there via her protagonist. Anna is put to work in the rectory, studies herbal medicine, takes on the role of a midwife and even descends into the mines to earn a living. This gives the reader access to every corner of a 17th century English village hit by a plague. The sense of doom hanging over the story reminded me of the best apocalyptic novels.

Year of Wonders might have been a five-star novel for me if Brooks had simply rethought the necessity of an epilogue, which not only drags the story out, but puts an ill fitting stamp on the book. A hopeful resolution might have been necessary with a subtitle like A Novel of the Plague and probably sold a million more copies, but the novel is far stronger without it. My advice would be to stop reading the book before the epilogue. Based on this harrowing novel, I'd absolutely read more of Brooks' work.

4.5★
“But now there is neither ice nor mud nor dust, for the road is grassed over, with just a cow-track down the centre where the slight use of a few passing feet has worn the weeds down. For hundreds of years, the people of this village pushed Nature back from its precincts. It has taken less than a year to begin to reclaim its place.”

NOTE: I read this in 2015 and added a bit to my review in 2020, during the global Covid 19 pandemic, the closest (I hope) that readers will come to experiencing the plague of 1665-1666. Cities have silent streets (not yet grassed over), people avoiding contact, carers, innovative ways to distribute food, and an increasing awareness of how much we took our daily interactions and small pleasures and conveniences for granted.

This is a realistic, grim account of England’s Great Plague of 1665-1666 as told by Anna, a very young village widow. Brooks’s writing is what makes this bearable and compelling to read.

The Black Death had been around for hundreds of years--during the Roman Empire and the late Middle Ages—but this is about the outbreak in Restoration England. Charles II and the court removed themselves to the countryside, and this village decided to quarantine itself.

The story opens in “Leaf-Fall, 1666”, after the worst of the Plague in their village, with Anna attending to the grief-stricken Reverend Mompellion. They are among the survivors who are struggling to contemplate a future after so many tragedies. It’s been a village of farmers and lead miners, and few are left to tend to anything.

But Anna is young, and in spite of everything (and believe me, there is a LOT of everything), she does notice new life. A walnut shell has cracked and sprouted right in the middle of the dirt road and is probably going to block the way--yet nobody’s pulled it out.

“Footprints testify that we are all walking round it. I wonder if it is indifference, or whether , like me, others are so brimful of endings that they cannot bear to wrench even a scrawny sapling from its tenuous grip on life.”

Then we’re plunged backward into “Spring, 1665”, before the worst, where Anna (wife and mother), is beginning to deal with the Black Death, and the villagers are deciding to close the gates following Reverend Mompellion’s advice. They worked out a system of exchanging goods so that they weren’t entirely without support, but nobody could visit family or friends.

Miserable time, gruesome descriptions, dreadful events, horrifying circumstances with no relief. Witches are accused and dealt with, corpses pile up and stink, filth is everywhere. It’s grisly, and men were often brutal to women and children even during the good times.

There’s a lot of praying – church is held outdoors in the warm weather, when the sickness spreads more—but the church loses a lot of believers, and not all to Death.

Anna learns how to brew potions and salves which help nourish sufferers and relieve some pain. For herself, she resorts briefly to a bit of poppy resin “stirring in a half cup of heather-scented honey to mask the bitterness” to enjoy a dream-filled night and “poppy-induced serenity” in the morning.

It’s tempting to turn your back on the story to choose something cheerier, but it IS compelling. Brooks has such a way with words and is so good at putting us there (which is hard when it’s so awful).

Here’s a nice bit (and there are many).

“We all live aslant here, on this steep flank of the great White Peak. We are always tilting forwards to toil uphill, or bracing backwards on our heels to slow a swift descent. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to live in a place where the land did not angle so, and people could walk upright with their eyes on a straight horizon. Even the main street of our town has a camber to it, so that the people on the uphill side stand higher than those on the downhill.

Our village is a thin thread of dwellings, unspooling east and west of the church. The main road frays here and there into a few narrower paths that lead to the mill, to Bradford Hall, the larger farms, and the lonelier crofts.”

And, we have the advantage of knowing that eventually . . . eventually, England recovered.

I read and enjoyed The Secret Chord but wished then for a glossary, and the same applies here. Some of the words I’ve read in other places, but some phrases and customs are new to me and not always obvious. You can find some help online, but I’d appreciate it in the books themselves.

If, in 2020 (and later), you are feeling sorry for yourself in "lockdown", be glad you're living in a time where we have books, communication, and labour-saving devices (not to mention home delivery, if you're lucky). :)