Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague | Geraldine Brooks

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague | Geraldine Brooks | (4.5 stars) a true novel of wonders, both amazing and terrible, in a village struck down by one of the most terrifying diseases

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Year of Wonders: A...

	Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague Geraldine Brooks Viking Adult, 2001 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 315 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Wonderful Story

I really enjoyed this book. It is a wonderful historical fiction story with rich charactors. It gave an insight of how small villages may have dealt with the plague and how it affected them and their family, friends and neighbors. I found the whole subject very interesting and the story captivating.I could not put it down. A must read!!!

(4.5 stars) a true novel of wonders, both amazing and terrible, in a village struck down by one of the most terrifying diseases

After I'd heard of "Year of Wonders" but before I'd read it my biology class took a day to learn about the bubonic plague. It was fascinating really. The disease comes from a bacteria that is transmitted through flea bites (usually who live on rats but sometimes dogs, cats, other animals) but there is a gene component to how it affects individual people. There are three kinds of genotypes when it comes to the plague. Type one-if you come in contact with the plague you catch it and die. Type two-contact results in catching the disease but you live. Type three-no amount of exposure can give you the plague.

That same day we learned about a British village that after contacting the plague isolated itself from the world for a year. That is what "Year of Wonders" is about-and why I read it. It's a little fictionalized-some names were changed so as not to offend long dead people whose characters were changed, but it's still the story of a village that sacrificed the lives of over half its inhabitant's life's so as not to infect a nation.

Told through the eyes, ears and voice of Anna, the mad at the rectory and a farmwife we learn of the extraordinary suffering, courage and evil that the human spirit can endure and exude in times of extreme stress.

This is a wonderful little novel that speaks very much to the human condition and just how much a person can live through and still go on with life. It's hopeful, uplifting, horrifying and very grim-but also wonderful. It is important to remember that wonders are not just the good things in life which amaze, but the terrible which try us.

To speak to a common complaint about the book-yes the epilog is out of left field a little bit more than unexpected. But I liked it.

Four point five stars.

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Compelling characters and a very good story...

I bought this book after reading and thoroughly enjoying Ms. Brooks' "March." I'm glad that I did because I couldn't put it down!

The story is set in the 17th century and is about the inhabitants of a small village in Derbyshire, England facing an outbreak of the plague. The narrator, Anna Frith, is a seemingly simple young woman who has lived all of her life in the village and knows nothing of the world beyond its confines. As a young widow and mother of two small boys, Anna works as a servant for the village minister and his wife.

When Anna takes in a seamstress/cloth merchant as a boarder, it soon becomes evident that "plague seeds" were among the bolts of cloth he brought with him from London. As he makes clothing for the villagers, the disease spreads and, before long, there is a massive outbreak among the villagers. Collectively, the villagers decide to quarantine themselves so as to contain the plague and not allow it to spread beyond the village. Anna is the reader's witness to this grave sacrifice.

"A Year of Wonders" is an excellent novel fraught with heartbreaking detail and very fine character development. My only criticism is of the ending, as many people have previously mentioned. However, I still recommend the book without hesitation and I look forward to reading more from Ms. Brooks.

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