Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

A story of death that ends with life, and the wonders of life. Everyone would benefit from reading. We should all strive to be Anna .

The compelling story of young Anna, a servant girl to the local pastor when the plague ravages their village. Her growing strength in the face of caring for a dying village is something I could not put down.

Easy to read and flowing narrative. The main character was beautifully written and it’s was believable to see her maturity and growth.

I heard an interview with Geraldine Brooks, the author of the book, in which she discussed her motivations and perspectives in writing this book. It sounded interesting, so...Actually, it's fascinating and very well written. It's told from the perspective of Anna Frith, a young servant to the town minister and his wife, who, as we learn in the first chapter, is a recent widow who has also lost her children. The book is written "in media res," (remember your 11th grade English?) in that it begins in early 1666, in the full grip of the Great Plague, and then goes back to the early part of 1665 and begins at the beginning.Briefly, and not to give too much away, it is about a small village in the lead-mining district of England that is exposed to the Plague by means of a flea-infested bolt of cloth that is brought into the village by a tailor who boards with the narrator, Anna. He is the first to die, followed fairly swiftly by about half the population of the village in one year. The village minister suggests that the village quarantine itself, so as to protect its neighbors from the Plague, and the villagers agree.Thus begins a year of horrors... and wonders. The Plague leaps quixotically from house to house, picking off some residents and sparing others, with no apparent rhyme or reason. Led by the minister and his wife. the village tries to unearth God's will and purpose in besetting them with this affliction, but nothing they come up with seems to work, and the body count keeps climbing. The Plague finally looses its grip after a year and some very unexpected revelations.The book is very well written. You can clearly hear the voice of the young narrator, a 20-year-old widow who has lost everything but her common sense. As she moves from crisis to crisis, you watch her grow from a fairly 2-dimensional character to a fully realized one, until she takes her destiny into her own hands in an action that would be unusual today, let alone 350 years ago.The book uses the vocabulary of the time, which includes many words that are no longer in our vocabulary, and are therefore unknown to us. The book offers no glossary, so you are on your own to figure out their meaning. This has a 2-fold effect: on the one hand, it slows down the reading somewhat, and makes for a certain degree of frustration because you don't really know what these terms mean. On the other, it certainly lends authenticity to the narration, and if you stop and think about it, you can probably figure it out. (The most exciting aspect of the book is that, after many, many years of crossword-puzzling that called for "adit" as the obsolete term for a mine entrance, this is the FIRST time I've ever actually seen the word used - puzzlers rejoice!)Partly because of the use of contemporaneous vocabulary, you get a real sense of what it must have been like to live in a small, poor village in the mid-17th century. Life was difficult at best, and this book brings that every-day-ness to life better than any other I can think of. It exposes the daily life of common people, under extreme duress, certainly, but still quite authentically.What makes it really interesting is that while presented as fiction, the book is based on fact; the village of Eyem quarantined itself, at the suggestion of its minister, during the Great Plague of 1666. The character of the minister in this book, Mr. Mompellion, is based on the real minister.I recommend this book. It's a fairly fast read and will leave you thinking about it at the end. I went back and reread some passages several times, just to make sure I had understood them properly - if you read the book, you will too, and will know which passages I'm referring to. Enjoy!

Anna Frith is an unlikely heroine, a woman clearly ahead of her time and used her good sense of being other oriented to help her community members. A humble servant in a rectory, she was quick witted, curious and had common sense. Set in plague ridden Eyam, Derbyshire, 1665, Geraldine Brook's portrayal of life and the times of that age was believable and the read was compelling. I could not put this book down. Her main characters were very well developed, her images of the deaths, the circumstances of their difficult lives and how they fought for their sanity was memorable. Some images that I remember are her assisting in the birth of a breech baby with her only experience as a livestock lamb birthing to back her up. Her saving a mine stream for a young orphan by setting a mine shaft on fire to combust the ores was equally exciting to read. Her love for Elinore, her mistress and teacher was convincingly a friendship between master and servant that turns in to confidante, teacher-student, mentor-mentee and beyond. The skill that which Brooks developed other memorable characters like Michael (the rector), Joss Bost (Anna's father) , Antero (the horse), Sam (Anna's husband), Jamie and Tom (her sons) is palpable. Aside from the characterizations that were developed by the language of the time, the words transported me to a different place and time, the countryside and London. Europe beseiged by the politics of the time was fractured, the times gave way to the the religious sects that have split the church, Papists, Protestants, Puritans, Quakers, Flaggelants, witches and devil worshippers. People were confused and the clergy had difficulty in explaining the natural and unnatural causes of the disease and the hysteria that came with it. All in all, it was just nature that they were against and that each one had to do their best to alleviate the pain, the horrific way the disease would take control of people's lives and their sanity. I salute Geraldine Brook's mastery of her biblical allusions, as well as the historical account of how the lens of religion sheds new vistas of how disease and medicine play a role in the lives of communities beseiged with a scientific problem.The burning of all of their possessions was the turning point of the story, where a cockerel's return to Eyam signalled the normalization of the community, no one else was dying because they have eradicated the cause of the plague, fleas.But the ending, where Anna finds herself in a foreign land, within the confines of another place with a different lifestyle and belief system is quite puzzling. Anna Frith was only 19 at best, and through her voice, Brooks was able to share the life and times of a plague ridden era, hinting that it could be relevant to present times. Easily, this story could have been the stories of women caught in war, in famine or even the bombings at The Boston Marathon, September 11 infamy and the other crisis the world community faces in the 21st century.

‘Year of Wonders’ tells the tale of Anna Frith, a young woman living in the village of Eyam, Derbyshire, during an outbreak of the plague (The Black Death). It’s supposed to be based on true events; the villagers really did decide to quarantine themselves (under the guidance of their rector, the Reverend William Mompesson) and stayed this way for just over a year whilst the disease swept through the village, wiping out entire families and decimating the population as a whole. The problem is, but for a few character’s names which remain the same, Brooks has taken it upon herself to change almost every aspect of the real events, leaving a hollow, disappointing novel about nothing much in particular.My main problem with the novel was Anna herself. She’s quite literally everywhere, from witnessing the first death, tending to virtually every single one of the sick and dying – including her own children – acting as an impromptu midwife and the most unbelievable role of all, working down a mine! She’s the 17th century equivalent of Wonder Woman and it just doesn’t ring true. Someone in her position – uneducated and from a poor family – would not have been able to do half the things she does without an education, money or social standing to support her, even if she is thought of as inquisitive and ‘unusually intelligent’. Yet despite all of this we’re meant to believe that she learns to read in English AND Latin, picks up the rudimentary elements of midwifery and is able to logically question the progression of the plague from a scientific (for the times) viewpoint. Nope sorry, it just doesn’t fly with this reader.Then there’s Michael Mompellion – presumably Brooks’ fictionalised version of the real-life William Mompesson – who’s written as nothing more than the characteristic troubled religious man, harbouring a dark secret. The problem is, the real Mompesson was nothing like his fictional character and it’s an insult to his memory for Brooks to portray him in this way. Were it not for Mompesson’s forward-thinking proposition and the devotion of his parishioners, the village of Eyam and many of the surrounding villages would certainly have been decimated by the plague. But Brooks has simplified this character to such a degree that there are no grey areas. He swings from good to bad, zealot to disbeliever, with no layers in-between, making for a wholly unlikeable character who, if he were actually based on the real Mompesson, would have struggled to find anyone devoted enough to listen to him, never mind following his instruction when it came to the quarantine.I understand it’s fiction and as such, writers can afford to stretch the truth a little even when writing a fiction novel based on fact. But to completely change a person’s character to suit your story, says a lot to me about how invested the author was in portraying this genuinely interesting historical event and the people involved. And in the case of Brooks’ ‘Year of Wonders’ it would appear she wasn’t interested in the slightest, bypassing the facts in favour of her increasingly ridiculous storylines.Essentially what this turns into is a ludicrous historical romance novel, with the occasional bodice-ripping moment sprinkled in, presumably to help spice things up a bit as there’s certainly no real drama or suspense found elsewhere in the novel. There’s no sense of the desperation the villagers must have felt when faced with the reality of the quarantine and as for the poor people who contract the plague and subsequently die, Brooks reels them off like the credits at the end of a bad film. We never get close enough to them or their stories because it’s ostensibly all about Anna and as a result, it’s difficult to care about any of them or share in their loved ones’ grief when another person passes away. In reality these people’s lives were a living hell, with one resident – Elizabeth Hancock – burying her six children and her husband in the span of eight days, just one of the many heart-breaking examples.I didn’t reach the end – it all got far too unbelievable and frustrating for me – but reading other reviews online, I understand that the ending is farcical to say the least which doesn’t surprise me given the first 3/4 of the novel. Whilst I’ve no doubt that Brooks is a successful writer – she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel ‘March’ so she must be doing something right – ‘Year of Wonders’ is so full of absurd ideas and downright unbelievable story arcs, it’s almost possible to convince yourself it’s been written by someone else who just happens to have the same name. Mind you, I’ve not read any of Brooks’ other novels, so perhaps they are all like this…?

It's curious how, under a mass Covid-19 clampdown, parallels emerge to earlier art or much earlier history: think of the mayor in “Jaws”, doing his best to dissuade the Chief of Police and others from closing the beach – the locality is safe, no giant sharks – because he's more concerned about financial prosperity, and compare such action with the attitudes of leaders of some governments regarding Cvd19. In contrast to that, look at how, under responsible leadership in the seventeenth century, a voluntary quarantine helped quell the spread of a virulent outbreak and prevent epidemic from ravaging its region.Just about everyone from the Peak District, Derbyshire and its neighbouring counties has heard the story of bubonic plague striking Eyam and the villagers' self-imposed quarantine. Here's a view of it from somebody from well beyond the area, adeptly expressed as first-person account from one of the survivors, and it's interesting to read this through the glass of a partial quarantine imposed nationally 3½ centuries later. Some of the names are genuine, notably the first victim and the retired minister, but some are deliberately made up. For instance, the authoress has changed the character of the village's rector and his wife, where she wants to tell a different story (although much of it consistent with the real rector's actions). Curiously, the name of the afflicted village is not mentioned (everyone knows what it is) but its location is given accurately in relation to other villages and towns nearby.Geraldine Brooks casts her narratress as a young woman of humble station, who is astute, determined and shrewd and learns well and quickly. (Of course, as an articulate writer herself, she has to do this so as to make the characterization feasible.) Thus she creates a narrative framework for life under the Plague (and life under lockdown – of a sort), and a close observer of the different characters which emerge with it. The disease emerges slowly in the village and nobody really takes it seriously to begin with. The infection hibernates though, and when the weather changes, the Plague strikes, and devastates. Time and again we see how all families of all characters suffer and the population continues to decline. Under the stress and fear, personal rivalries and resentments and mediæval superstitions are all accentuated.There's also quite a long central section, where the life of the 17th Century Peak District inhabitants is described. There's an engrossing, if brief, account of the lead mining which was the area's economic mainstay around that time, other than farming. Geraldine Brooks has a year to fill in this narrative, so she wants to give it some substance, not mere padding. This all works effectively, so even if some events are not documented in the village's history, the episodes in the narrative are quite plausible. Mind you, in all this and its textured variety, the men are either simple or wicked (sometimes both) and some of the women too, but it's only the female characters who show kindness or intelligence. Let's not dwell too long on this cheap, puerile misadrony, as the whole thing is put together well, although it is disappointing to see the rector's nature and achievement tainted or diminished in her revision to actual events; it's pointless and is the one thing in the novel which doesn't ring true.It's a notable effort from somebody not even from the same country, let alone county. The authoress, having developed a career as a social historienne and journalist, must be accustomed to the leg-work of research and investigation and seems to have done a good deal. Her narratress uses old English or possibly regional dialect terms, which help give a sense of character, place and community. Their use is sparing though, so we can glean the meaning from the context. (Perhaps she's been especially witty and just made them up! I doubt it though, but it would be quite funny.) Rather than reading a version from a Peak District writer (proclaiming the heroism of the ancestors) it's in some ways a bit more gratifying that an outsider with no previous knowledge of the events has chosen this episode in English history around which to craft, with a largely accurate historical basis, such an entertaining and instructive novel.

This author tried so, so incredibly hard until page 36 when she Americanises and horribly misspells two words back to back. It went from 20th century English (set 1666) to slangin' ayn twayngin' in da twennee firs cenchuraayy huck huck. I should point out that before this a man comes to live in the house of a widowed 18-year-old mother which is something that would NOT happen in this time period, let alone a PRIEST recommending her as a landlord to a random merchant man. Within 3 days (months after her husband dies) of meeting this man who is living in her attic, she is thinking about marrying him. Not historically accurate and the foul spelling guaranteed we instantly left the weak shambles of the 1600s and fell into the modern day. Not once did I think this was the 1600s and I have studied history extensively. This is fantastical, borderline fanfiction of true events.Poor quality writing with too many errors and not enough capacity to keep a reader in the time period.

I admire the author, but this was NOT in the same league as March, for several reasons: uneven tone (varying from near-Shakespearean to near-modern), uneven characterization (see the rector as well as - more damagingly - Anna, and uneven plot (towards the end, the plot veered from the fantastical to the unlikely and back again). The premise was promising, though Anna's near-remorseless virtue (her unlucky lodger aside) becomes dull, and the procession of corpses unremitting. Still, I believed in Anna until she mounted the rector's uncontainable stallion - ahem! - controlling him perfectly with no hint that she'd ever ridden before, bedded the rigorously correct rector - similarly! - and ridden off, metaphorically at least, into the sunset to another country. NOT likely. NOT believable. Just... not in keeping with the remainder of the book. Which was, anyway, notably lurid in violence - some of that equally unbelievable - as in black-and-white characterization. (Also suspect: scene in mine, with explosions, rector's sudden conversion from deadened grief to sex stud.) Basically, a disappointment. This writer has - and WILL - do very much better.

I came to this book through an online course on Historical Fiction. I was so glad to read Year of Wonders and to discover the author Geraldine Brooks. The novel is set in 17th century Derbyshire and is based on real events in the village of Eyam which Brooks found out about when doing a walking tour of the Peak District. The plague arrived in Eyam in 1666, probably carried in a bale of cloth from London for an itinerant tailor in the village. Convinced by their minister the villagers entered into a voluntary quarantine for a year to prevent the plague from spreading to other villages in the area and many of the villagers died over the course of the year. Brooks (a former Middle east correspondent for the Wall Street journal) carried out meticulous research to present the story from the point of view of the Minister's housemaid Anna. The book is beautifully written in the first person by Anna who seems immune to the plague and is able to reflect on the different ways in which the villagers try to come to terms with the illness. We read of heightened religious fervour, exploitation of the vulnerable and witch hunts. Brooks' writing is so convincing that it is all too easy to be able to apply these reactions to contemporary global events. I will definitely be reading more by Geraldine Brooks.