Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
In Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks chronicles life in a tiny English village in the year 1666. What makes this "year of wonders" so fascinating is that it was the year in which an outbreak of bubonic plague struck England. Brooks's novel is based on the historical village of Eyam in the Pennine Mountains, whose denizens were challenged by their local vicar to quarantine themselves to avoid further spread of the disease throughout the countryside. As the villagers doom themselves to near-eradication (two-thirds of them will perish before year's end), the story raises compelling questions about human nature.

The harrowing story of these brave souls is recounted by one Anna Frith, a maid in the charismatic vicar's household. Having watched helplessly as her own family succumbs one by one to the virulent plague, Anna is utterly devoted to the minister's teachings; but as the virus begins to recede, she begins to doubt his entreaty. Like many great historical novels, Year of Wonders will leave readers mulling over its essential questions long after they've finished the book. (Fall 2001 Selection)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated mountain village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes, we follow the story of the plague year, 1666, as her fellow villagers make an extraordinary choice. Convinced by a visionary young minister, they elect to quarantine themselves within the village boundaries to arrest the spread of the disease. But as death reaches into every household, faith frays. When villagers turn from prayers and herbal cures to sorcery and murderous witch-hunting, Anna must confront the deaths of family, the disintegration of her community, and the lure of a dangerous and illicit love. As she struggles to survive, a year of plague becomes, instead, annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders." Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged mountain spine of England. Year of Wonders is a detailed evocation of a singular moment in history.

FROM THE CRITICS

Arthur Golden

...leaves us with the memory of vivid characters struggling in timeless human ways with the hardships confronting them....An engaging story.

Library Journal

In 1666 the bubonic plague appeared in a small mountain village in England, where it took hold and spread. In a novel and courageous effort to keep the disease from extending beyond the village, the local minister and his congregation took a sacred oath to quarantine themselves until the illness was spent. Brooks has used this piece of history as a framework for her fictional account of what it might have been like to live through the event. Told by Anna Frith, the housemaid for the minister and his wife, this is a tale of devastation, grief, and madness as well as the attempts, both medicinal and spiritual, by the townspeople to combat the disease. The author has captured the various human responses to grief, fear, hopelessness, and exhaustion. Characters are well drawn, showing both the good and evil sides of human nature. Compelling and believable, the unabridged version is masterfully read by Josephine Bailey; the abridged set is equally well narrated by Stina Nielsen. Recommended. Joanna M. Burkhardt, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island, Providence Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Brooks's title is based on the actual lead-mining village of Eyam, Derbyshire, whose inhabitants voluntarily quarantined themselves for a year when stricken with Bubonic Plague in 1665-1666. Anna Frith is widowed at 18 by a mining accident and is the mother of two young boys. Through her recollections, readers live through the year as her endurance and abilities are sorely tested. Anna works for the new young minister's wife, who teaches her to read and becomes more of a companion than a mistress. At her employers' suggestion, Anna takes in a boarder to help meet expenses. The man is a tailor and when a shipment of fabrics, apparently flea infested, is delivered from London-the plague is suddenly upon them. The minister convinces his flock to make the supreme sacrifice and arranges for food and supplies to be delivered to the outskirts of the hamlet. The story is a portrait of the best and worst in people faced with sorrow, terror, and death. Some succumb to madness, others display cowardice and hysteria, and a few look for solutions in murder or self-mutilation. Through it all, however, Anna grows in strength, abilities, and understanding as she faces the loss of her children, her friends, and her innocence, and takes on the tasks of an ever-dwindling populace. This is an excellently portrayed study of the wonder of human courage.-Carol DeAngelo, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

AudioFile

Portraying goodness over the length of any performance is a dicey proposition. It so easily becomes cloying and saccharine, sometimes to the point of distracting from the story itself. That Stina Nielsen avoids such a pitfall it a testament to her talent. Brooks's novel follows a year of the plague through the experience of Anna Frith, a housemaid and the book's unlikely heroine. Nielsen imbues Anna with such honest passion and generosity that the character maintains our sympathies throughout a story steeped in loss, betrayal, and faith. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

Painstaking re-creation of 17th-century England, swallowed by over-the-top melodramatics: a wildly uneven first novel by an Australian-born journalist. The Year of the title is 1665: the date of the devastating bubonic epidemic chronicled in Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. Brooks's tale, framed by reveries set a year and a half after the plague burns itself out (in "Leaf-Fall, 1666"), is narrated by Anna Frith, an earnest and highly intelligent young widow who buries her own multiple bereavements (first her gentle husband, later their two small sons) in work, aiding her (unnamed) village rector's wife in treating the sick with medicinal herbs and traditional cures. Brooks is at her best in lyrical, precise descriptions of country landscapes and village customs, and makes something very appealing and (initially) quite credible out of Anna's wary hunger for learning and innate charitable kindness. But the novel goes awry when the panic of contagion isolates her village from neighboring hamlets, a forthright young woman and her distracted aunt are accused of witchcraft and hunted down, and Anna's drunken, violent father, who profits as a gravedigger for hire, resorts to providing corpses that will require his services. The excesses continue, as Anna's stepmother, crazed with grief, seeks vengeance against rector Michael Mompellion and his saintly wife (and Anna's mentor and soulmate) Elinor, and rise to a feverish pitch when Anna, having found a new innocent victim to nurture and raise, offends the powerful Bradford family and must flee to safety-ending up (in a borderline-risible Epilogue) in North Africa in the sanctuary of a kindly "Bey's" harem. It's all more thana bit much: Thomas Hardy crossed with Erskine Caldwell, with more than a whiff of Jane Eyre in Anna's conflicted devotion to the brooding, Mr. Rochester-like Mompellion. In between the more hysterical moments, Brooks writes quite beautifully. But Year of Wonders was a mistake.

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