Year of Wonders

Rating:
Summary: "Year of Wonders" terrific read with modern relevance
Review: Geraldine Brooks certainly couldn't have anticipated that her book about the plague coming to a small town during the middle-ages would have such relevance today.

Her well-crafted tale of a small village's decision to quarantine itself and the resultant behavior of it's inhabitants as they face the implications of their decision kept me turning the pages. Admittedly, the book starts at a brisk pace and falls of somewhat towards the end. But the conclusion is satisfactory and the characters and their behavior under such enormous stress is believable.

If I had doubted the latter, I would have been convinced when SARS hit Asia last year. I lived in Shanghai then, which was not a hot bed for the pandemic, but you would never have known it from the behavior of the community I lived in. I recommended this book to many of my friends at that time as they wrestled with the problems of whether to flee the region or stay put, whether to go out in public places or stay home and with whom to associate....all issues Brook's addresses in "Year of Wonders". While Shanghai didn't turn as violent or deadly as events in "Year of Wonders" the emotions Brooks evoked were spot on.

This one came close to 5 stars and I've read my copy twice. It's a quick, evocative read with surprising modern relevance.

Rating:
Summary: A book of wonders!
Review: The cover caught my attention at the aiport when I noticed the much smaller subtitle "A Novel of the Plague". What I discovered was a true treasure. Anna lives life in a small relatively isolated village in England during the infamous plague year of 1666. The novel is voiced from her perspective as her village of 300 souls is wracked with not only the plague but the emotions, psychologies, and economics that traveled hand in hand with the dreaded disease. To look upon such a year of loss and devistation with anything but sorry would be difficult. But Anna goes even further to find it a year of discovery, learning and growth. This book is sad in places, a bit gory in some places, but inspiring throughout. The author is to be commended for this fine piece of writing and it is a book I highly recommend!

Rating:
Summary: Superb piece of work!
Review: Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders is a superb novel. It's an intelligent, engaging, emotional read. Anna Firth is a survivor, in many ways. She survives the plague, which utterly decimates her village. When the plague arrives, she has already lived through various adversities. Her father abused her and her husband died in a mining accident, left her a widow with two young children at the age of eighteen. As disease rips through her village, Anna works with the minister's wife, trying to provide solace and comfort to the rest of the village. The plague is not the only killer in these times -- hatred, jealousy and prejudice have destroyed the lives of the townspeople. The unnerving experience makes Anna a stronger person. The aforementioned statement may sound trite, but said statement is the overall essence of this novel -- and it works. There are parts of the story that literally had me in tears. I cannot recommend Year of Wonders enough. It is a superb, beautiful and compelling read!

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Subject, Good Writing, Shaky Plot
Review: Year of Wonders is based on a true story that occurred in England during the 17th century. When the plague comes to a small village, the villagers, at the urging of their preacher, decide to barricade themselves in to prevent the spread of the disease to other places.

Brooks focuses on a likable, intelligent maid, Anna, who provides a link between all of the village's residents. Most of the novel provides a retrospective narrative of the year or so that the village struggled with the plague, while the rest of the novel reveals Anna's situation following the reopening of the village.

Brooks's style is elegant and lyrical and the subject is fascinating. It is also interesting to see how Brooks imagines characters' reactions to such a horrifying situation. It is unfortunate that the plot is not as deep as it could have been. Certain plot twists, such as those involving the village's preacher, Mompellion, and Anna's life at the end of the novel, seemed a bit out of place and too extreme.

The quality writing and the unique subject matter definitely qualify Year of Wonders as a "good book," but the sometimes weak plot keeps it out of the "great books" category.

Rating:
Summary: Year of Wonders Makes the Plague Year of 1666 Come Alive!
Review: Geraldine Brooks is a Wall Street journalists who has covered the world in her internationial beat. In this engaging work (her first fictional outing) she does a splendid job of delineating life in a Derbyshire village during the Great Plague of 1666.
Brooks chooses to tell the grim story through the eyes of Anna a widow woman who loses her two young sons to the ravages of the bubonic plage. The village in which she lives )based on a true English village of the time) is led by a pastor who urges the people to remain in the town rather than carry the plague to surrounding villages and cities.
Anna tells of her ministering to the dying and even delivers a baby. Along the way we see witchcraft accusations leading to a terrible murder of two innocent women by a rabble mad with fear.
Anna is close to the clergy couple who aid the dying. Anna's
father is a horrible drunk and child abuser who even attempts to bury a live man in order to collect the burial fee!
Without revealing more of this wonderful story the reader should know that this novel is beautifully written in a style
focusing on the sheer wonder of living life day to day. The flowers and food, music and myths, religious zeal and tragic days of England in the year of plague come vividly alive before the reader's eye.
Daniel Defoe chronicled the Year of the Plague but his work dealt with life in London during the horror. Brooks who has done her research takes us to a bucolic village which serves as a microcosm of the human soul during criis. In our day of post 9-11 the novel teaches us how in times of crisis ordinary human beings can act angel and also bestial.
Well done for a rookie novelist. This is a book which will linger in the mind months after it is collecting dust on the shelf. I enjoyed it!

Rating:
Summary: you may hear from me
Review: year of wonders is a great book! i really enjoyed! geraldine brooks uses elegant language, which i like, i learned new words reading this book. a thing that pushed me to read this book is that i love historical fiction and plague periods. anna is a brave and courageous character (i imagined her to be like drew barrymore). elinor mompellion is a kind and wonderful character, my favorite character. rector michael mompellion remained admirable to me throughout the story except at almost the end (i imagine him to be a tall, handsome, intellectual young man with intense eyes). i was dissapointed with the character, i used to like him a lot.
i finished this book the sunday before the release of the LOTR-the return of the king. i feel i can somehow identify myself with anna and elinor. i really enjoyed and got lost in the book. i would spend hours reading it and wanting to know more about what came next. i must say the ending was, let's say, not the best and most likely to happen ending. i didn't like the ending.
i recommend this story to all who can identify with a character who goes through a lot of life-changing events; to those who like historical fiction; and to those who like surprises in real-life like stories, i belive you may enjoy this book as i did. but you also must know that this story is depressive and sad.
if you would like to discuss or talk about this book with me you may e-mail me at [e-mail] or IM me. :) i would like to talk with someone about this great book.

Rating:
Summary: Poignant, moving and superbly written
Review: This is a beautiful and haunting story ultimately about empowerment and salvation, a sometimes brutally descriptive plague-era period piece made contemporary by its suffusion of new age and post-feminist perspective. When the plague visits a small English village in 1666, killing half its population in the course of a single year while isolating the village from all outside contact, the narrator, Anna, rises from her humble, illiterate church servant position to that of community caretaker and, ultimately, savior. In losing her own husband and children, in addition to countless other relations, friends and neighbors, and through her subsequent ministrations to the dying and bereaved, she becomes intimately familiar with misery and suffering, and recounts it in moving, self-reflective detail. The church rector, Mr. Mompellion, and his wife Elinor, whom Anna ostensibly serves, become her partners in caring for a decimated and increasingly deranged community of God-fearing farmers and miners, who alternately see the plague as either a test or a punishment administered by either God or Satan. The Mompellions also complete an important character triangulation that finally represents the underlying conflict and crisis propelling this story.

Anna's experiences and the effects they have on her personal evolution are the central story here, and though I found her character transformation predictable in many ways, I was nonetheless consumed by her plight and found myself irresistibly drawn to it, and, by extension, to her. The author Geraldine Brooks, a Wall Street Journal reporter who vacations in the English countryside and who quite literally stumbled upon the real-life Plague Village upon which this story is based, is so imaginative and descriptive in her storytelling that I truly lost myself in this book, despite its many gruesome and gut-wrenching passages. For a brief period near the end of the book I was distracted by a scene of forbidden love that I felt had been taken from a Harlequin Romance, but except for that one imperfection, this is an otherwise amazing piece of work, especially considering that it is Brooks's first novel. She is quite a gifted writer and storyteller.

Rating:
Summary: History come alive
Review: I hated history in school - mostly rote learning of dry dates pertaining to wars, treaties, alliances, kings - yes, the black plague was among those things "learned". But it didn't really sink in - the absolute horrific reality of people dying all around you, of isolating the well with the sick and abandoning them to their fate for fear of contagion, the search for blame and persecution of innocent people who perhaps were spared for some reason or other.
"Year of Wonders" is a fictionalized account of a true event - it tells the story of a a small village in England in the 1660's which, faced with the devastation of the Black Plague, had the courage to seal the village off from the outside and thus contain the disease within. It is fascinating to read about how the villagers each cope with the illness in a different way, some turning to witchhunt, some to greed, some to flagellism.
I gave this book 4 stars only because I felt that the end didn't seem to match up with the rest of the story - the author seemed to have run out of ideas of how to find a fitting ending to the story. Still, it is definitely worth reading and I recommend it to anyone who likes to read historical fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Truly Wondrous!
Review: The story of Anna Firth and her plague-stricken village is the story of the survivor in all of us. Everyday we walk this Earth our faith in God is tested by one affliction or another. Some cower and run, some lose faith and slowly disintegrate, and the rest (empowered by faith in God/Science) persevere and deal with it. The plague of 1666 can be easily compared to the AIDS of 1981. People are falling left and right and no one knows why, and even worse, how to stop it!

The book is definitely expressive and doesn't shy away from describing horrific accounts relating to plague symptoms, ignorance-driven killings, crazy atonement methods and sheer madness induced by despair. The details, told so vividly, can be a little gory for the squeamish of us.

The story has many subtexts that you will find to be very intriguing. The ending is heartwarming as it brings total closure to an incredible saga of survival. I cannot recommend it enough!

Rating:
Summary: ¿Wonders¿ is wonderful!
Review: I am a sucker for anything historical, so I knew Year of Wonders had at least that aspect going for it. And by novel's end, I felt very satisfied. It was everything I expected, and even a little bit more. And as depressing as this book may seem, I had a fantastic experience with Year of Wonders, and am looking forward to another book by Geraldine Brooks.

Set in a small village in England in 1666, Year of Wonders tells the story of young Anna Frith, a widow with two small boys. When Anna takes in a boarder, an experienced tailor from London, he unwittingly brings with him the Plague contained in a contaminated bolt of cloth. As the infection spreads throughout the village, the rector, Michael, asks the villagers to quarantine themselves in an effort to keep the sickness from escaping into neighboring communities. And Anna soon finds herself in a position of healer, comforter and companion to the many families in which the Plague affects.

This was an incredible story. And at first, one is puzzled regarding where the "wonder" fits in. Then by the close of the book, it all becomes clear. I was utterly fascinated by the struggle and strength of the Plague community. I will remember this novel for a long, long time. I hope there is another great story coming soon from Geraldine Brooks.