Rating: 
Summary: Haunting and Evocative
Review: While it is not my habit to write book reviews, it is my occasional habit to recommend books to others which I have found to be worthwhile. I truly enjoyed Ms. Brooks' Year of Wonders for her simple but elegant writing style and her touching and sympathetic main character, Anna Frith. I won't comment much on the plot (since others have already done so) but I would say that Ms. Brooks' descriptions of Anna's life and times are very haunting and evocative. I normally don't like to become too bogged down with description, but I think the reader really becomes drawn into the sights, sounds and smells of Anna's 17th century world and her personal struggles which often seem uncomfortably close to our own modern ones. The epilogue did seem to be somewhat of an unlikely plot twist, but I am willing to put that down to my own prejudices.I enjoyed this book very much. Perhaps you will as well.
Rating: 
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: I heard about this book on NPR, and when I read the reviews on Amazon, I was almost certain I'd really like it. Well, I was wrong. The book was more about soap opera scandals, petty behavior, and predictable "trysts" than it was about the sociological impact of self-imposed isolation during the plague. I must give credit to this author's publicist, because s/he has done a wonderful job spreading the word about a mediocre book.
Rating:
Summary: Like a Breughel Painting Come to Life
Review: YEAR OF WONDERS held me spellbound like no other book has done in years! Like a Breughel painting come to life, the sights and sounds and smells of the little English village that quarantines itself with the plague in 1666 fly off the page and into your mind. The story is told by Anna Frith, a simple woman, servant to the rector Michael Mompillion and his delicate wife Elinor. Though Anna loses her boarder and her two young sons to the Plague she is not infected and spends the year tending to those in the village who fall victim. Elinor teachers Anna to read and together the two women experiment with herbs and potions to ease the suffering all around them. There is witchcraft and trickery and mob violence. But Anna survives the Year of Wonders, even as she learns the truth about the relationship between the rector and his wife. Anna is a remarkable character and her story will move you.
Rating:
Summary: Most poetic novel since "Snow Falling On Cedars"
Review: I loved this book. I checked it out from the library, and returned it two days later.
For a novel that is so dark, and depressing, there is a lot of joy, and happiness as well.
You don't know what is going to happen, and although the prologue does talk about a characters death, when it happens, you are suprised, and saddened. I have recommended this book to a couple of co-workers, and they have both thanked me (After having run out and bought it that evening) Strong characterizations, where even the most vile show some good, and the most saintly hide a dark past.
WOnderful wonderful read.
Rating: 
Summary: Strong narrator and vivid period sense
Review: Inspired by the true story of a rural British village's plague year, 1665 to 1666, journalist Geraldine Brooks' fiction debut recreates a story of heroism, horror and death, narrated by a young woman, Anna Frith, widowed at 18 and maid to the village's two prominent families. The novel opens in the plague's aftermath with the apples rotting on the ground for lack of pickers. Two thirds of this village of lead miners and shepherds have died. Roused from his bitter torpor by the return of the squire's family, Michael Mompellion, the rector, emerges to deliver a tirade of recriminations on the family which abandoned its people to their fate.
It all began with Anna's lodger, a tailor whose cheer and tales of travel enlivened her household. Her husband dead in the collapse of his lead mine, Anna supports two small children with her domestic work. A woman of no education but great natural gifts, life is looking up for Anna - Mrs. Mompellion has taught her to read and the tailor has proposed - when her young suitor is felled by a horrible disease. Anna cannot bring herself to heed his dying words and burn the new fabrics sent from London. Cloth is dear and the villagers' money has been spent.
Brooks ("Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women," "Foreign Correspondence: A Penpal's Journey from Down Under to All Over") hauntingly imagines the creeping progress of contagion, the dawning terror and bewilderment of people who regard God as a daily presence. After a mob attacks an old woman as a witch, the rector calls upon the population to accept plague as a gift from God, an opportunity to shine with noble sacrifice and seal the village so as not to carry infection to the countryside. Arrangements are made for provisions to be left at the boundary and the villagers, who mostly have nowhere else to go anyway, hunker down. All except the squire's family, who slip out of the church during the sermon, turn off their servants, and flee.
Anna's growing role as midwife and nurse leads her through crises, illuminating the generous, the craven, the devious, the weak and the strong. Religious fanaticism (this is after the Restoration and the ousting of Puritanism) rises; crops rot in the fields; the young die and the old live on. Brooks' journalistic eye seamlessly integrates details of 17th century life - household furnishings, food, the labor of lead mining and husbandry, and the rural worldview of God and superstition - into the drama of tragedy. If Anna sometimes seems to good to be true, this is a story that benefits from a strong beacon. So many of the secondary characters are helpless, already too beaten by their hard lives to rise from another blow, that Anna's character leavens some of the bleakness.
Highly visual, with well-drawn characters, a vivid period sense and strong dramatic tension, Brooks' first novel is more than promising.
Rating:
Summary: Year of Wonders
Review: I really loved this book until I reached the last few chapters. The majority of the book is well written and has wonderful character development and historical information about the plague and its affect on a small town's population. However, the last few chapters read like a gothic romance novel. It could be an entirely different book. Despite the disappointing ending, I would recommend this book to my friends.
Rating:
Summary: well-researched and imaginative
Review: "Year of Wonders" is a beautifully imagined, well-researched book about a small village in England in the Year of the Plague, 1666. Told by the intelligent, observant young woman, Anna, this book will grab your interest and make you want to read straight through. Some of Anna's words, phrases, and verb forms are antiquated, although you will be able to grasp the meaning quickly, and take note in passing, of the richness of our English language. The village characters are well-defined, although each character has mysteries of his own, just like the people in our own lives. The theme is bleak and the losses are many, although there is lightness and joy as well. You'll become very familiar with this little medieval English village, and the turn of events at the end will come as a surprise.
Kudoes to Gwendolyn Brooks, a gifted writer, on her first novel!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Pure, documented History can make excellent reading. However at timeswith a format that requires reading footnotes constantly as you readthe text, the subject matter can become less compelling than itotherwise would be. While I am in no way advocating that scholarlyHistory should be avoided, there are instances when Historical Fictionis so good it can act as a catalyst for more scholarly reading. Thisbook is a prime example, for though the Author has created names andadded to the Historical Record, she in no way strayed from whatreasonably could have happened. The Bubonic Plague is a horrificaffliction. I have read books on the subject that were fiction andnon-fiction, and while all are unsettling, this book gives the readerno quarter. I don't generally wince when reading descriptions ofdisease, however even with the first case that Author Geraldine Brooksdescribed, the book made it clear it is not for those of delicatestomachs. At the same time this is one of the aspects of the Novel Iliked the best. The Author related all the horror, suffering, andterror this disease represents, without being gratuitous or usingshock value in lieu of good writing. Ms. Brooks did a great job ofusing period dialogue, sentence structure, and words appropriate to17th Century England. The vocabulary was the only point of frustrationfor me. I do not mind looking up definitions, however some words werenot to be found, and trying to draw a definition from the context ofthe placement of a word was not always possible for me. I don'tbelieve this caused me to be denied critical events; it was just asmall annoyance. There are several very good writers that are writingin this genre. This may be this lady's first entry, however it isan auspicious debut that puts her writing with the best of herpeers. Unconditionally recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Years of wonder
Review: Overall, I did like this book. I find myself quite intrested in the years of the plague. So It was with intrest that I picked up a copy of The Years of Wonder. I found it to be a charater driven romanitic tale wrapped around a time of great diffuculty. I would have liked a little more detail about the Black Death in Eyam and a little less about the" living" survivors. Its a good twist on a romantic tale though.
Rating:
Summary: Like a Brueghel Painting
Review: Sena Jeter Naslund summed up Year of Wonders perfectly by comparing it to a Brueghel painting - a painting brought to life by a very talented writer. This is an unforgetable story that you won't put down. The good news is, the plague ends. The bad news is, so does the story.
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