Pretty good historical fiction. The audio book was a bit slow sometimes, but that was the pace of the era. ( )

"Forgive me, mistress, but these times, they do make monsters of us all."

Wow, this was a very sad story. I don't know much about the nitty gritty of the plague. I had to look up the different forms of plague to understand why there was disgusting bursting and the sweet smell of rotting fruit. Many descriptions were just foul.

but this is a very interesting story. Not knowing anything, I found it immensely fascinating. I didn't always like Anna, but I think that has everything to do with this as an audio book.

It was good...if frightening and gross. ( )

The year of the title is the year of 1666 when the Plague came to Anna Frith's mountain village in England. Anna is widowed at 18 with a toddler and a baby. She works for the Reverend Michael Mompellion and his wife Elinor. The story follows them and the villagers during that time as seen by Anna. A proposal by the Reverend to shut themselves off until the disease is spent (no one in, no one out) is based on a true village happening at that time. We see how they deal and suffer and the great changes that are its result. During the year true character and secrets are revealed. As usual this was a great story by Brooks. ( )

I am not sure about this book. It's not bad, but not exciting either. I didn't finish, I read the users reviews and the Q&As here, they gave away the "surprise" ending. It's not a book for me. ( )

When the plague visits an isolated village in the English countryside, a housemaid na,ed 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 endure a self-imposed quarantine to keep the disease from spreading. 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 ,ire of illicit love. As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes a “year of wonders.” ( )

In a Nutshell: The more the expectations, the greater the disappointment. Utterly dismayed at this ‘Hollywoodised’ version of the Eyam plague story.

Story:

1666. Anna Frith is a young widow who works as a housemaid to support herself and her two little boys. When the rector sends a boarder her way to supplement her income, she readily agrees. Little does she know that this boarder brings with him some cloth infected with ‘plague seeds’. As the disease begins spreading its virulence, the villagers turn to religion as well as superstition.
The story comes to us in the first person pov of Anna.

Where the book worked for me:
( )

While this was a compelling, easy read, it ended on an odd note, completely unexpected with no foreshadowing to indicate the unlikely resolution of the heroine's life. We tried to discuss it in my book club but failed to maintain a conversation about the book's myriad events. ( )

I didn't hate it but it got on my nerves. The plot was kind of stupid. The ending was interesting though, and plagues are always fun. ( )

The novel's narrator is Anna, a young widow with two children. Anna lost her husband to a mining accident (the region is known for lead mining). To make ends meet, Anna takes in a border who is a tailor. He has brought with him bolts of cloth from London that are infected with fleas bearing the plague. The plague quickly spreads throughout the village. The local rector persuades the villagers to self-impose a quarantine. Anna serves as a house maid to the rector and becomes close to Elinor, the rector's wife. Elinor reveals a shocking incident in her young life involving a self-induced abortion of a pregnancy from a jilting lover. Anna knows two eccentric women who are healers of a sort and have a garden with many exotic plants and herbs. After the two healers are accused of witchcraft and are killed by a mob, Elinor and Anna cull the garden for salves and potions they use to alleviate the suffering of the stricken. Elinor is highly educated and is familiar with the works of Avincenna, a Muslim pioneer in medicine. Elinor had taught Anna to read as she recognized that Anna is very intelligent.

The novel uses an actual plague village from 1666 to tell the story. The horrors of the plague are vividly described. There are hundred of deaths, sometimes entire families. The plague brings out the best and worst of people. Anna's father and step mother are particularly repulsive. He is a drunkard who becomes a grave digger who extorts the families of the dead for his services, at one point he attempts to bury a boy alive. For this, he suffers a gruesome death at the hands of the outraged villagers. Anna's step mother loses her mind and in a frenzy unintentionally strikes Elinor with a knife killing her.

The plague runs its course. While still grieving Elinor, Richard has relations with Anna. He tells her that he was never intimate with Elinor, justifying his withholding of relations as her deserved atonement for her sin of aborting her baby. This shocks Anna and she withdraws from him. Anna encounters Elizabeth, the daughter of the local nobility. Elizabeth says her mother soon to die from a labor turned bad. Anna has had some experience as a midwife and goes to the Bradford estate to find that there has been an intentional effort to hasten the mother's death. After she successfully delivers the infant she observes Elizabeth trying to drown the new born. Her mother's pregancy was the result of an adulterous affair bringing shame on the family. Anna is falsely accused of taking jewels and, with the new born girl, flees. As she is being pursued she takes a ship which ultimately lands in Oman. She is taken in by Ahmen Bey, who, like Avincenna, is renowned for his advances in medicine. She becomes one of Bey's wives and bears his child. She becomes a medicine person, particularly for women who are not comfortable with male doctors.

The novel is well-plotted. The author has researched the effects of the disease. The descriptions of the sickness and violence are quite strong. ( )

This was a great read, though pretty heavy and more than slightly depressing. Not one to read if you are going through a rough patch, unless that sort of thing helps you out of it! ( )

The Black Death has always intrigued me, and this book was wonderful in how it explored the emotions attached to plague and the spreading of disease. The characters are especially enthralling, no doubt partly because they are based on real people. Highly recommend to those interested in history and social challenges brought on by disease. ( )

We listened to this on a trip across the Southwest. Geraldine Brooks read her own work to good effect. ( )

I came to this book by an NPR article discussing pandemic lit. It's a fictionalized tale of the real English town that, struck by plague in 1665, chose to sacrifice themselves by quarantining the town in hopes of preventing the spread of disease to their neighbors.

At least, that's the framework for the story, but the real story is its characters and how they respond to the crisis, how they endure or find strength or break as they lose their neighbors and loved ones. How for some, it's business and opportunism as usual as they use legal means to take a valuable mine from an orphaned child because her dead father can no longer work it or defend it, or price-gouging for grave-digging services when the church graveyard is full and there is a shortage of able-bodied men. How the taverns are always full and the fearful mob inevitably looks for witches to burn.

But it's also the story of neighbors looking out for each other, of a mother rising above the grief of her lost children to care for the dying and deliver the new babies when the doctors flee the town, of the religious leaders look past their fundamental differences to provide leadership to people in need, how a pastor and his wife work tirelessly to minister to the whole town, good or evil of spirit, deserving and undeserving.

There are some odd twists at the end that surprised and angered and disappointed me, but overall the story had me fascinated throughout.

Audiobook via Overdrive, and I strongly recommend you do NOT do this one on audio, because it's read by the author who may be a very good writer but is a terrible narrator, and yet I was so engaged with the story that even her droning voice couldn't put me off. ( )

It may be erroneous to say a work of historical fiction is prescient, but this 2001 novel took on new life in 2020. Based on the true story of the remote English village of Eyam that communally sacrificed itself during an outbreak of the bubonic plague in 1666, Year of Wonders is a miraculously beautiful novel. The characterization is rich and dimensional, with housemaid Anna Frith as a wonderfully developed (and developing) narrator. When the village rector convinces (most of) the village to self-quarantine from outlying towns, the loss is immense, but there is hope and growth and surprises. What is good and what is bad become murky and no one is immune from the challenges, even if they manage to stay healthy. The writing is extraordinary, wrapping in references to seventeenth-century village life and social structure without artifice. For all its graphic depiction of disease and childbirth, there is an underlying elegance which carries the reader along with just enough distance that we can understand 1666 to be 1918, or 2020, or whatever catastrophes we may face in the future. ( )

I really enjoyed this book until the last few chapters. The ending was just strange. ( )

I'm quite frustrated with myself for not reviewing this immediately after reading it---TWO MONTHS AGO---because so much life has happened since I finished it that I can't remember what I really wanted to say about it! I do know that I've tried to read this several times and almost gave up this last time, but persevered and was so glad I did. I also remember being shocked at the turn of events that takes place the last time Mompellion visits Anna's house and that her response and subsequent responses were not what I was expecting, making for an unsatisfactory ending. This is a period of time I really enjoy reading about---it just took me a bit to get into the story to realize that it was exactly my cup of tea. ( )

This book is based on the true story of a Derbyshire village where the plague arrived, probably in cloth sent from London, and where the villagers made the brave decision to enforce a voluntary quarantine on themselves so as not to spread the disease to the other villages and towns around. However, the novel doesn't stick to the facts in several important areas, more's the pity.

When the story opens in autumn of 1666, Anna, a young woman, is working as a servant for the rector, who is deeply depressed following the death of his wife and the huge loss of life (half the population) that has resulted from their voluntary isolation. Anna herself suffers from her losses: she had been widowed in a mining accident before the plague arrived and her two young children died of the disease. The lady of the manor's daughter turns up demanding the parson come to see her mother - who she ends up confessing is in labour with an illegitimate child and likely to die - and is sent away in no uncertain terms by the rector, who has lost his faith.

The book then goes back to the time before the plague began, when Anna took in a lodger, a young tailor who sent for cloth to London, unwittingly importing the plague-carrying fleas that causes the whole disaster (although the 17th century characters remain unaware of how plague is transmitted). It then follows through the entire year until it once again reaches the period where the book opened.

There are a few issues as the story unfolds because very few of those who die are developed as characters beforehand, and therefore the reader feels no real connection to them. The continuing deaths become quite repetitive. The story is told in Anna's first person viewpoint and at times there's a somewhat anachronistic flavour in her views of the world, despite the attempt to have her speak in a slightly old fashioned way, with a liberal sprinkling of dialect terms which are never explained and where the meaning is often not ascertainable from the context.

However, those aren't the real problems with the book, which I found a total disappointment. Part of the trouble is that I've read a lot of history books, so certain things jumped out as wrong and derailed my belief in the story. However the entire last sequence is genuinely a car crash, as I'll come on to, but it was prefigured for me early on.

Firstly, the village originally relied for medical help on an old woman and her niece who grew a physic garden and prepared herbal remedies, and also provided midwifery services. The author's idea of these women owes more to Margaret Murray's long-discredited notion that witchcraft was a survival of ancient goddess-worship, rather than the documented evidence about 'cunning folk' as they were known (both men and women). For example, every time her characters pronounce a charm, it has a formula about being pleasing to our grandmothers. The real cunning folk recited charms that were based on Christian prayers.

Secondly, although it might seem 'obvious' to 21st century readers that the plague would be blamed on witches, from what I've read about how it was viewed from the middle ages onward, this wasn't the case: it was seen instead as God's punishment on a sinful humanity, probably because of the occasions in the Bible where He sent plagues, e.g. to the Egyptians. The kinds of illnesses and deaths attributed to witches were smaller scale and without a discernible cause - such as a sudden death (which we would recognise as a stroke, for example) or death after a lingering illness. Plague was recognised as such - as it is in this story - by its 'tokens': the buboes or swellings in the lymph nodes (neck/armpit/groin) and the 'ring-a-roses' under the skin. The sequence where the village turns on its cunning folk and murders them struck me as pure melodrama, and the author's inclusion of material from a Scottish witchcraft "confession" (as she confirms in her afterword) shows that she hasn't understood the material she researched. It would have been much more salutary to have used the documentation about English witchcraft cases, for example the Pendle witches, as the Scottish and English views on the subject were very different. For most readers I realise this is an academic point, but I almost stopped reading at that point, and the switch from actual drama to melodrama didn't bode well for the rest of the story.

Another odd scene is the one where Anna's son and his friend play with the corpses of black rats. It's true that when infected rats died, the plague-infested fleas migrated to people, but that happened in London and other places where rats brought the disease from ships at the docks etc. Here it arrives in flea-infested cloth from London so there wouldn't be any infected rats to begin with and the fleas didn't need to pop back onto rats in between, considering they gave the disease to the tailor soon enough and his customers ignored the advice Anna gave them to burn the clothing he'd made. It's as if the author read the material about the dying rats - she mentions it in her Afterword - but without understanding the sequence, so didn't realise it wasn't needed here.

The main part of the story deals with the various deaths, Anna's role in nursing the sick and her growing friendship with the rector's wife, Elinor. The two women use a book translated from Arabic into Latin - Elinor reads it although she has meanwhile taught Anna to read and write English - to teach themselves the plant lore lost when the two wise women were murdered. Eventually they manage and Anna also becomes a credible midwife. There's a slightly anachronistic element in their recognition that they need to build up the strength of the younger people who have less immunity to the plague, but that isn't too bothersome. That element of the story is quite interesting even though it comes across as the writer too-obviously showing her research, as does the chapter where the two women go down a lead mine to get an orphaned girl sufficient lead to allow her to hang onto the claim.

However, it is when things really part company from documented history that the car crash I mentioned looms. In short order, there's the improvised crucifixion of Anna's abusive father, followed by the grand guignol madness of her stepmother - dancing crazily in her house around the strung up body of her remaining child, then dragging said corpse to the outdoor 'church' the villagers have been using and attacking the rector, then cutting Elinor's throat and stabbing herself.And in the final section, there's a total rewrite of the rector's character which completely undermines the credibility of the story. I suddenly found I was reading a romance novel: after a wild ride on the moors reminiscent of Wuthering Heights, Anna returns to fall into bed with him, convinced he's the love of her life. It's literally a rude awakening when she discovers he was just getting some sex after deliberately depriving Elinor of the same for the whole of their married life while doing his best to make Elinor as lovelorn and lust-tormented as possible, all to punish her for having performed a do-it-yourself termination which had made her infertile - so hadn't she been punished enough? Granted that he's lost his faith, but it seems he didn't love Elinor anyway, so why did her death send him over the edge? No, after the strong, spiritual, caring side he's shown all throughout the novel, which allowed him to convince the villagers to go along with the quarantine despite their appalling suffering, this was a step too far. The writer would have needed the ability of a George Elliot to make that one believable.

After that ridiculous interlude, the rest is a whistle stop tour where everything bar the kitchen sink is chucked in - the attempted infanticide by the grown up daughter, of the lady of the manor's illegitimate baby, then Anna's escape with the rejected child helped by the rector who is suddenly nice again, then her being pursued by some member of the l-o-t-m's family who wants to kill both her and the baby, then life threatening storms at sea, escape to a foreign land and finally a life of fulfillment in a harem as one of the wives of an Arab doctor, where a few years later Anna is a doctor to women and is bringing up both the illegitimate baby of the l-o-t-m and her own child by the rector all of which could have constituted a novel in itself but was zoomed past in a handful of pages. Any remaining credibility went out of the window, and a book that had hovered around the 3-star mark despite the earlier clangers about witchcraft and plague vectors dropped to 1-star. A shame, because the subject matter was promising. The real-life story of the rector and his wife - the historical people on whom the characters were based had children whom they sent away before the quarantine, but the wife stayed to help and died of the plague - would have made a touching story, and we would surely have seen a man tested to the ends of his faith but somehow, it seems, still managing to cling onto it. That would have made a more enriching story than something that veered through umpteen genres including body ripper and leaves an unsatisfying impression. ( )

Anna, a miner's wife, a mother of two young sons lives through the plague in her small English village. This account is based on the story of a village that isolated itself to avoid spreading the "plague seeds" to other villages. Although it took a terrible toll on this village, their actions did save the surrounding villages. ( )

This is the second Geraldine Brooks book I have read and just like [b:People of the Book|1379961|People of the Book|Geraldine Brooks|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1442955497s/1379961.jpg|3020568] it is a warm-hearted historical page turner. The story of a village ravaged by plague in the seventeenth century is compelling and emotionally engaging. Anna Frith, the narrator and hero, is a very likeable character, with a fierce intelligence and a real personal journey over the pages. Brooks effectively evokes the brutality of life before the industrial revolution, with so much depending on luck. A woman with a good husband and good health could live quite well, but if her luck failed her in either way, she was doomed to a life of misery and struggle.

The ending of the book is somewhat baffling, slipping from drama into melodrama for the last thirty pages or so in a way that actually undermines the truth of much of what precedes it. However, this doesn't seem intentional, so I choose to judge the book in terms of its first seven eighths, rather than the last.

The prose has great rhythm and tone, with the action compelling and swift and the sadder moments much quieter and more measured. Stylistically it relies on occasional ye olde language that is probably not accurate, but helps to create the right mood regardless. ( )

Here's what I wrote in 2008 about this read: "How coinidental to read another plague-centered story so quickly. An early feminist is involved in caring for the dying around her, while searching for love (with an married village rector). Inspired by an actual village in Derbyshire." ( )

https://www.instagram.com/p/CvC55xzL_hn/

Geraldine Brooks - Year of Wonders: This was too much horror too frequently. Maybe before the pandemic, but not now. #cursorybookreviews #cursoryreviews ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed this story. It was both heartbreaking and uplifting. The author drew me in and I shared Anna's joys, sorrows, triumphs and losses. ( )

this novel was on some real Whence Ye Morrow Thither bullshit, but it turned into such an extended gross-out, i was happy enough with it. like, i'm still laughing in horror at the idea of framing a story between the first bursting buboe and the actual popping of the last bloated corpse. ( )

The plague strikes a town in the mid 1600's, and this tale tells the story of a young woman trying to survive during what can only be described as "the year from hell". As she faces trial after trial, she becomes very close friends with her employer, the wife of a pastor. The book goes into great detail about her daily life trying to deal with the death and destruction around her and her changing relationships with her friends and relatives.

I found the part about the plague to be very well written and engaging. However, I did feel that the author took a little to literally the advice that many new writers receive:

Your protagonist must want something. As a writer, you must throw barriers in their way. The barriers must be come increasingly insurmountable."

Unfortunately, because Brooks uses a LOT of drama throughout the middle of the book, it would be easy for the ending to fall flat. So, I think Brooks attempted to create even MORE tension and drama at the end and the book sort of collapses under the weight of it all.

I definitely didn't hate the ending, but I don't feel the body of the book supported some of the character changes that were displayed at the end. It felt forced. I actually think the book could have ended about 25 pages or so earlier with no harm whatsoever.

The epilogue was much worse for me than the ending, and really was an unnecessary bit altogether for me. All in all, I definitely still would recommend this book as an interesting read that does a great job of showing the strength and weakness of the human spirit when facing great adversity. ( )

Meh. I actually forgot that I read this. Not a good sign. ( )