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YEAR OF WONDERS

by Geraldine Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 6, 2001

In between the more hysterical moments, Brooks writes quite beautifully. But Year of Wonders was a mistake.

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 than a 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.

Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2001

ISBN: 0-670-91021-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001

HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ

by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018

The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...

An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.

Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowi erer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas . She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.

Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

Title: Year of Wonders

Author: Geraldine Brooks

Publisher: Penguin Books

Genre: Historical Fiction

First Publication: 2001

Language:  English

Major Characters: Anna Frith, Michael Mompellion, Elinor Mompellion

Setting Place: Eyam, Derbyshire, England, 1666

Theme: Community and Convention, Female Sexuality and Friendship, Faith, Suffering, and God’s Will, Science and Superstition, Justice and Judgment

Narrator:  First person from Anna’s Point of view

Book Summary: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna’s eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition.

As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love. As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a “year of wonders.”

Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history.

Book Review: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks is narrated by Anna Frith, a shepherdess who also spent a few hours daily as a servant in the rectory. The rector of the church, Michael Mompellion, convinces the villagers to quarantine themselves within the village so the plague will not spread to nearby towns. A wealthy Earl leaves supplies and food on a large stone at the boundary line. The rector’s wife Elinor works with Anna nursing the sick, and preparing herbal tonics to strengthen people. The villagers turn to superstitions, magic charms, fasting and flagellation, and devil worshiping in the hope that something might stop the spread of the plague. Digging graves is unending work. How can people keep their faith and their sanity when they are suffering such great losses?

The Black Death had been around for hundreds of years–during the Roman Empire and the late Middle Ages—but this is about the outbreak in Restoration England. Charles II and the court removed themselves to the countryside, and this village decided to quarantine itself.

“God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother’s heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so.”

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks opens in “Leaf-Fall, 1666”, after  the worst of the Plague in their village, with Anna attending to the grief-stricken Reverend Mompellion. They are among the survivors who are struggling to contemplate a future after so many tragedies. It’s been a village of farmers and lead miners, and few are left to tend to anything.

But Anna is young, and in spite of everything (and believe me, there is a LOT of everything), she does notice new life. A walnut shell has cracked and sprouted right in the middle of the dirt road and is probably going to block the way–yet nobody’s pulled it out.

Then we’re plunged backward into “Spring, 1665”, with Anna (wife and mother), beginning to deal with the Black Death, and the villagers deciding to close the gates following Reverend Mompellion’s advice. They worked out a system of exchanging goods so that they weren’t entirely without support, but nobody could visit family or friends.

“Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.”

Miserable time, gruesome descriptions, dreadful events, horrifying circumstances with no relief. Witches are accused and dealt with, corpses pile up and stink, filth is everywhere. It’s grisly, and men were often brutal to women and children even during the good times.

There’s a lot of praying – church is held outdoors in the warm weather, when the sickness spreads more—but the church loses a lot of believers, and not all to Death.

Anna learns how to brew potions and salves which help nourish sufferers and relieve some pain. For herself, she resorts briefly to a bit of poppy resin “stirring in a half cup of heather-scented honey to mask the bitterness” to enjoy a dream-filled night and “poppy-induced serenity” in the morning.

“It is a great thing to be young and to live without pain. And yet it is a blessing few of us count until we lose it.”

I think Brooks’ genius comes from her ability to isolate. She chooses a sweeping historical event and then uses it as a backdrop, telling the story through marginal and seemingly insignificant characters. For instance, in March , we experience the Civil War through the eyes of the father from Little Women and in Year of Wonders she shows us how it might have been to experience life in the 17th Century and the horrors of the Black Death through a singular and courageous servant woman in a remote village in Derbyshire, England.

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks gets its title from John Dryden’s poem “ Annus Mirabilis, The Year of Wonders, 1666 ” in the epigraph. It was the year when the black death ravaged England, and the Great Fire destroyed parts of London. Geraldine Brooks brings us to the small village of Eyam, Derbyshire where bolts of cloth from London, infested with fleas, were delivered to the tailor. He was the first villager who succumbed to the plague with many more following.

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Reviews of Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

Year of Wonders

A Novel of The Plague

by Geraldine Brooks

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' Opinion:

• Historical Fiction
• UK (Britain) & Ireland
• 17th Century or Earlier
• Strong Women

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Book Summary

This gripping historical novel is based on the true story of Eyam, the "Plague Village," in the rugged mountain spine of England. In 1666, the bubonic plague is brought to this isolated settlement and the people choose to seal themselves off to prevent the spread of infection.

This gripping historical novel is based on the true story of Eyam, the "Plague Village," in the rugged mountain spine of England. In 1666, a tainted bolt of cloth from London carries bubonic infection to this isolated settlement of shepherds and lead miners. A visionary young preacher convinces the villagers to seal themselves off in a deadly quarantine to prevent the spread of disease. The story is told through the eyes of eighteen-year-old Anna Frith, the vicar's maid, as she confronts the loss of her family, the disintegration of her community, and the lure of a dangerous and illicit love. As the death toll rises and people turn from prayers and herbal cures to sorcery and murderous witch-hunting, Anna emerges as an unlikely and courageous heroine in the village's desperate fight to save itself. Exploring love and learning, fear and fanaticism, and the struggle of science and religion to interpret the world at the cusp of the modern era, Year of Wonders is at once a story of unconventional love and a richly detailed evocation of a riveting moment in history. Like Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha and A. S. Byatt's Posession, Year of Wonders blends learning and romance into an unforgettable read.

Chapter One Apple-picking Time

I used to love this season. The wood stacked by the door, the tang of its sap still speaking of forest. The hay made, all golden in the low afternoon light. The rumble of the apples tumbling into the cellar bins. Smells and sights and sounds that said this year it would be all right: there'd be food and warmth for the babies by the time the snows came. I used to love to walk in the apple orchard at this time of the year, to feel the soft give underfoot when I trod on a fallen fruit. Thick, sweet scents of rotting apple and wet wood. This year, the hay stooks are few and the woodpile scant, and neither matters much to me. They brought the apples yesterday, a cartload for the rectory cellar. Late pickings, of course: I saw brown spots on more than a few. I had words with the carter over it, but he told me we were lucky to get as good as we got, and I suppose it's true enough. There are so few people to do the picking. So few people to ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• The Bradford family bears the brunt of Mompellion's rage when they leave town to save themselves. However, weren't they only doing what every other noble family did in those days: run because they had the means to run? Setting aside the events near the end of the novel (which make it clear that one would be hard-pressed to find a redeeming quality in any of them), can you really blame ...
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Publisher: Viking Press

First Publication: 2001

Book Review: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

You know that deliciously unsettling feeling you get when a book manages to transport you to a vividly-realized, yet utterly harrowing period in history? The kind where you almost wish you could un-remember certain visceral details because they’ve taking up such immovable residence in your psyche?

Well, prepare to have Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders take up permanent space in your brain housing group for Historical Traumas. Because this emotional powerhouse of a novel doesn’t just recount the terrifying ordeal of a 17th-century English village being ravaged by the bubonic plague —it makes you feel like you’re living through that excruciating yearlong nightmare yourself.

Right from those ominous opening lines where our unforgettable heroine Anna Frith watches a roadside rendezvous take a horrifically fatal turn, you know you’re in for one of those sparse, unflinching literary recounts of human tragedy. Brooks doesn’t mess around in establishing the fatalistic yet strangely dignified tone that’ll permeate this whole haunting endeavor.

While it might require strapping in for some truly bleak thematic territory, the immense payoff is getting to see the world of 1666 Eyam spring to visceral life through Brooks’ carefully-researched historical detailing and densely-wrought atmospheric staging . This is the kind of transportive literary experience where you can practically smell the dank, lifeless air of plagued-ravaged homes and feel the grit of the village’s rutted dirt roads beneath your feet.

That exquisite authenticity is due in no small part to Brooks’ unshakably self-possessed narrator Anna Frith—one of the most grounded, relatably human voices I’ve had the pleasure of following in recent literary memory. Torn from her lifelong position as a servant for the affluent Mountjoy family to bear witness to Eyam’s hellish sacrificial quarantine, Anna might start off as a fairly milquetoast Puritan everywoman.

But over those devastating months of plague catastrophe, she gradually transforms into a fiercely compassionate, almost martyr-like force of empathy and survival instincts. Her voice is so compellingly naturalistic and unvarnished, laced with biting flashes of folk wisdom and a wry sense of gallows humor that kept me tethered even in the book’s darkest stretches.

Like when she dryly observes the hilariously absurd “home remedies” being peddled for preventing plague exposure—including parading around town with a haunched cat stuffed in one’s armpits, I kid you not. Or her merciless skewering of the more sanctimoniously hypocritical religious factions who treat the plague as an act of divine reckoning to persecute nonconformists. Those tiny pops of bone-dry levity feel like such an authentic counterweight to the heavy horrors she’s witnessing.

Speaking of those horrors, Brooks most certainly doesn’t hold ANY punches in depicting the pure bodily scourge that was bubonic plague. Many a time I found myself squirming while reading alarmingly vivid descriptions of oozing boils, putrefying flesh, or the sheer bad luck of being the sole survivor in a household full of reeking, bloated corpses.

Of course, that lingering grotesquerie is the whole point, really. By bombarding you with the most unvarnished, stomach-turning particulars of 1666’s plague realities, Brooks viscerally reminds us that these were people leading humble yet fully-lived lives…before nature’s cruel caprice condemned them to an agonizing end no human should ever endure.

The true devastation of these deaths isn’t numbing historical statistics or dates in textbooks, but their soul-rending particulars—a detail that plays a pivotal part in one of Year of Wonders’ most wrenching storyline arcs. Experiencing that lingering trauma through Anna’s perspective packs such a cathartic wallop, especially as she channels that anguish into a radicalized sense of compassion.

That gradual transformation of Anna from a meek domestic servant into a doggedly selfless force to be reckoned with is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Much like the indomitable Keisha from Brooks’ equally searing Indian saga The Book of Longings, you can feel her psyche and moral core being irrevocably shaped by the extreme hardships she weathers.

Whether it’s risking exposure to provide solace to her plague-stricken neighbors or bravely confronting the smug elitism of the wood-dwellers who’ve quarantined themselves in the countryside to thrive, she displays an increasingly dauntless resolve that’ll have you rooting for her survival. Thanks to Brooks’ deft characterization, Anna blossoms from a passive reactor into a full-fledged force for human dignity.

But while Brooks could have easily rested on making Year of Wonders a straightforward historical slog-through of trauma purification, she grounds the narrative in real emotional stakes and pathos by weaving in undercurrents of love and betrayal. There’s the star-crossed courtship between Anna and a dashing young pastor that packs real romantic yearning between the surrounding devastation.

There’s also the stark depiction of broken marriages and petty infidelities that fester in the hothouse atmosphere of plague-riddled Eyam—including one particularly gut-punching breach of Anna’s loyalty that’ll undoubtedly shatter a few readers’ souls right alongside hers. Even in an apocalyptic landscape of bodily ravages, human folly and weakness can still flower with a vengeance.

But as harsh and utterly-leveled as reality becomes in book’s most despairing stretches, Year of Wonders never loses sight of the transcendent power of human resilience and perseverance—life’s natural antidote to death’s cruelties. Brooks leaves you with such a profound, bittersweet sense of how these villagers rose to the occasion of profound calamity rather than descending into scapegoating or selfish survivalism.

Under Anna’s stalwart leadership, they forged a localized civilization of neighborly care and shared sacrifice that almost feels miraculous amid the squalid dying all around them. When the book’s closing memorial refrain hits, you’re left with such a haunting, affirming sense of gratitude for individuals who answered history’s darkest callings with dignity and enduring grace.

So be warned, Year of Wonders is most certainly NOT your typical escapist historical yarn. This is an unflinchingly immersive descent into a prolonged circle of hell that humanity was ill-prepared to weather, told through the candid viewpoint of one of literature’s most extraordinary everywoman narrators.

But those who brave the plagues, betrayals, and existential gauntlets within these pages will emerge at the other end of Eyam’s fateful quarantine. They’ll carry with them a sense of quiet affirmation about the trembling persistence of hope in humanity’s darkest hours—plus some perspective on how their own mundane grievances pale in comparison to what our ancestors weathered and overcame.

Just make sure to have some very stiff tea and a few ginger snaps on hand to help fortify your spirit while traversing these realms of historical anguish. Trust me, after reading this book, you’ll view the mere concept of comfort food in an entirely new light! But the catharsis will be more than worth the harrowing journey.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, year of wonders.

The subtitle of this book is A Novel of the Plague, which set me to wondering why epidemics are so grimly fascinating. There are plenty of contemporary specters to haunt us, of course: AIDS, Ebola, the threat of biological warfare (intensified by the anthrax scare and the prospect of facing a smallpox outbreak with little or no vaccine). Perhaps one way of dealing, psychologically, with these more present dangers is to become absorbed in the scourges of the past.

I think we're fascinated, too, by the contrast between 17th Century thinking and our own. Instead of the characteristically modern effort to find a rational explanation for disease or natural catastrophe, in those days the irrational --- the belief that such tragedies were divinely ordained to punish sinful humanity, or cooked up by the devil --- held sway. It is the tension between this theological view of the world, and particularly of the plague, and the nascent stirrings of the science of medicine, or at least of a rudimentary plant-based method of healing, that dominates YEAR OF WONDERS.

At the heart of the book is an account of how a community deals with crisis (another subject close to our modern hearts, especially in New York City). The year is 1665-66; the place is England, recently emerged from its Civil War and reestablished, to the accompaniment of a fair amount of post-Puritan debauchery, as a monarchy. The Black Death has ravaged London and now, in the person of a journeyman tailor, finds its way to an obscure mining village in the north. Geraldine Brooks, a journalist-turned-novelist, based her book on a real town called Eyam, which, led by its vicar, resolved to quarantine itself (no one in; no one out) until the plague had done its worst --- an act of extraordinary altruism and vision.

The tale unfolds through the eyes of an 18-year-old woman named Anna Frith. An escape route from her abusive father had appeared several years before in the form of marriage to a goodhearted but uncouth miner (his lovemaking technique and intellect left something to be desired) who gave her two sons then was killed in a cave-in. Now she works as a housemaid in the local rectory; she's also taken in a boarder: the tailor who becomes the town's first plague victim. Anna comes under the lucky influence of the vicar, Mr. Mompellion, and his wife Elinor, who teaches her to read and treats her as an equal and friend. Also included in this group of enlightened villagers is the local wise-woman and midwife, Mem Gowdie, and her niece, Anys.

Those are the good guys. The characters here are fairly black and white: Anna's father is so bad that eventually the whole town turns against him; the others are so good it makes your teeth ache (although the Mompellions do turn out to have some secrets that take the sugar out of their saintliness). As death passes inexorably from house to house, sparing almost no one, the villagers respond variously: panic, rage, greed, meek acceptance, murderous superstition. How Anna deals with the plague and its victims, and triumphs with her own kind of courage, is a moving story that Brooks tells beautifully, embedding it in the homely details of everyday life: the food and clothes, the landscape and passing seasons.

I do have a couple of caveats. Brooks's dialogue, perhaps out of a journalist's desire to be historically accurate, sometimes dips into the laughably archaic (does "You ignorant slattern" remind anybody else of Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtin on the original "Saturday Night Live?"). Ironically, given this effort to avoid anachronism, YEAR OF WONDERS also suffers from what I would call a modern agenda. Anna's religious doubts and inquiring proto-scientific mind --- "Perhaps the Plague was neither of God nor the Devil, but simply a thing in Nature, as the stone on which we stub a toe" --- verge on the too-good-to-be-true. Mem and Anys are clearly homeopaths, far more skilled than the local doctors (who mostly apply leeches and hope for the best); among their potions Anna even finds a "poppy tincture" that briefly tempts her to flirt with opium addiction. And Anys, ahead of her time, obviously believes in free love. Yes, historical fiction tends to single out the misfits and pioneers in a particular place and time, not its typical citizens; yet in this case Brooks goes too far in making 17th Century women into modern ones.

Still, Anna is a splendid, redoubtable heroine. In literature, the servant is frequently the invisible observer who proves to have greater wisdom, imagination, and just plain goodness than her "betters." Jane Eyre, for example (of whom there is more than an echo in YEAR OF WONDERS), scrutinizes her employer with a kind, sharp, yearning eye, and ultimately heals and transfigures him. Anna comes out of this tradition; unlike Jane, however, her destiny does not lie in the conventional state of marriage (even though the Reverend Mompellion is a bit of a Mr. Rochester figure), but somewhere far more exotic. Let the precise destination be a surprise to readers who have yet to discover this book. It's quite delicious.

Reviewed by Kathy Weissman on January 24, 2011

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

• Publication Date: April 30, 2002
• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
• Paperback: 308 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
• ISBN-10: 0142001430
• ISBN-13: 9780142001431

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