I have never read Geraldine Brooks before but have wanted to, have heard good things about her books, especially People of the Book. I always figured that would be the one I read first, but it hasn’t turned out that way. Brooks’s book Year of Wonders is one of the contemporary historical fiction books on the reading list for my historical fiction MOOC. She will even be attending one of the classes to talk about the book.
I was expecting a lot from this book which might explain why I finished it a bit disappointed. Not that it wasn’t good, I did enjoy it, but I was not wowed by it. Before I explain that further, let me give you a bit of plot summary.
The book is based on the real village of Eyam in Derbyshire, England. In August of 1665 a tailor living in the village received a bundle of cloth from London and was dead of plague a week later. The village made the momentous decision to quarantine themselves so as not to spread the disease to other villages and towns. The infection spread through the village, never leaving its precincts, and by the time it ended 14 months later only 83 of the 350 villagers had survived.
Year of Wonders begins a few weeks before the plague comes to town. The narrator is Anna Frith, the widow of a lead miner and housekeeper to the minister and his wife. Anna married when she was about fifteen to get away from her abusive father. She had two sons with her husband before he was killed in a mining accident. She is still quite young, twenty perhaps.
When a new tailor came to town and needed a place to stay she took him in as a lodger. Just as they were starting to romance each other, he gets the cloth from London with the fleas that have the plague and then the rest of the book is death after death after death.
The village has quarantined itself so no one leaves and no one enters. It becomes a microcosm of what happens during times of extreme crisis. While the minister is preaching fortitude and faith in God, the villagers are stringing up the midwife and herbalist as a witch. Meanwhile the entrepreneurial among them are charging extortion rates for burying the dead, even going so far as to dump one poor soul into his grave before he is dead. While others succumb to superstition and still others go completely insane.
Our narrator is generally in the thick of things. She finds herself elected the new midwife since she has experience birthing lambs from the small flock of sheep she keeps. She also helps an orphan girl extract enough lead from her dead father’s mine so no one can take it away from her. And because the minister’s wife Elinor takes a liking to her, she is also taught how to read. She is an altogether too good to be true sort of woman. This was one of the causes of my disappointment with the book, Anna was not entirely believable, especially with what happens at the end. It boggled my mind.
But that was not the only thing I had a hard time with. Brooks’s style also made me grind my teeth from time to time. She wrote the book in modern English but so we would know it was really supposed to be 1665 – 66, she’d throw out some odd phrasing now and then that was meant to sound old. And then there were certain word choices. She’d use words like “chouse,” “whisket,” and “boose.” I ignored it at first but they started catching me up and bothering me. Okay, I thought, if you are going to toss out old words I am going to check the OED and make sure you chose ones that would really have been in use. While she did pretty well, I did catch her out a few times like with “jussive,” a word not known to be in use until 1846. To my mind you either go all in with the phrasing and the word choice and you get it right, or you don’t do it at all.
But it wasn’t a bad book in spite of all the things that annoyed me. The story moved along at a good clip but would slow down for some introspective moments too and these things were nicely balanced. It was also interesting watching the different ways faith in God changed. For some it grew stronger and stronger, for others God ceased to exist, and for many more there was much confusion and doubt. What really got my attention and made me think how horrible it must have been was this passage:
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 itβs true enough. There are so few people to do the picking. So few people to do anything. And those of us who are left walk around as if weβre half asleep. We are all so tired.
What do you do when suddenly the people you relied on for daily goods and skilled services are gone? Mines went unworked, fields unplowed, crops unplanted. No blacksmith. No one to buy winter hay from to feed your sheep and horse. A bustling village decimated and not a day goes by when someone doesn’t die or become ill. And suddenly a mild cough or fever becomes a thing of terror. Should it turn out to not be the plague, what a relief!
That passage is what saved the book for me. The plague was an end-of-the-world scenario that really happened. Between 1347 – 1351 the plague reduced the population of Europe alone by about one-third. And there were regular and continuous outbreaks. The plague is still with us and people still die of it, though, thanks to modern medicine, not in the numbers they once did.
I am looking forward to what Brooks has to say about the book in my class. If she says anything particularly interesting, I’ll let you know.
I’ve been disappointed by Brooks’ writing style too. I had heard great things about March, but when I read it, it was just nothing…so very forgettable.
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Nish, It’s hard isn’t it? I appreciate what she is trying to do but much of the time it doesn’t work for me.
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I like Geraldine Brooks in general, but in my opinion, People of the Book is by far her best. I hope you’ll give it a try, despite being disappointed with Years of Wonder.
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I have Year Of Wonders in a pile somewhere…an OK novel. History and fiction are such a fit ( Walter Scott found the winning formula) but it is obviously very hard to get it right. I agree with you that the author’s attitude to “authenticity” of language should be consistent.
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Ian, yes, an OK novel but nothing particularly special about it. Fiction and history go very well together, but I agree, it can be a hard combination to get right, a balance between evoking the time and place but moving the story along and making it memorable.
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Book Strings, I will still give People of the Book a try, I own a copy. Fingres crossed I like it better than Year of Wonders!
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I just started Year Of Wonders and am about 25% through it. So far I “like” it but am not riveted by it..yet anyway. In other words, I can pick it up and read it but not resent every interruption that keeps me from it…like going to work and going to sleep. In fact, if I had to return it to the library today I’m not sure I’d put it back on the hold list. That said, I’ll probably be giving it a 3 stars on Goodreads when all is said and done. I am hoping to make more progress before Brooks presents at MOOC. Maybe I’ll like it better after she speaks.
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Grad, I liked it too and kept waiting to be riveted but it never happened for me. Definitely a 3 star book. I wonder if I might not have been so critical of it if not for the class? It’s not like we are doing a lot of textual analysis or anything but I am thinking more carefully about historical representation.
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I loved Year of Wonders when I read it years ago (before blogging), but I was reading it fast and uncritically, without looking up any of the words. What you say about an end-of-the-world scenario is what I liked most about it–the sense that this is the way things would have played out for such a place, if they were lucky enough to have a woman like the protagonist in the middle of it.
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Jeanne, if I weren’t reading it for a class I might have enjoyed it more and looked at it less critically. The end-of-the-world aspect really stood out. I mean all these dystopian novels these days with zombies and viruses and aliens and you name it all happening in the future, well it’s happened already in a way with the plague. Scary to think about really.
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I haven’t started this yet and typically they have to go and set the only Brooks novel I haven’t read. I’ve enjoyed her other books but am bound to be hyper-critical where this one is concerned because I know the village of Eyam very well.
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Alex, heh, isn’t that the way it goes? I hope you end up liking this book then and I am just being over critical. I hope since you know Eyam you will share some of that knowledge on the wiki π
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I have been thinking about reading this one, but the things you mention are the sorts of things that will probably bother me, too. So I have an expectation that it will be a light read for me, not expecting to fall in love with it…
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Jeane, yes, it is a light read. I was expecting something much more literary and I think that played into my disappointment too.
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“I was expecting a lot from this book which might explain why I finished it a bit disappointed… I was not wowed by it.” Interesting, that’s exactly how I felt after reading People of the Book.
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Yes, I agree Arti. I loved the historical thread in People of the Book – and thought she handled that pretty well – but not the contemporary one which was just a little too pushed for drama to my mind.
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Arti, oh don’t say that! I have been hoping that one might be one I like better! I’ll try to lower my expectation and then maybe I will be pleasantly surprised.
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I’ve read three books by Geraldine Brooks now (March, People of the Book, and this one). I always expect to like them more than I do. I never hate them enough to give up on her, but I’m always a little disappointed, especially since she’s so highly acclaimed. This one was, I think, the most absorbing of the three I read, but it was also the one I had the most problems with. From what I remember, the ending irritated me a lot–didn’t it turn into a romance all of a sudden?
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Teresa, oh yes, the ending was horrid. Yes it did turn into a romance of sorts as she runs away and end up in a Muslim country and marries and learns proper doctoring. During the last 20 pages or so I kept sputtering, yeah right! and No way! Sigh.
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I remember enjoying this book pretty well. It didn’t blow me away either, but it was an enjoyable read, particularly when it comes to the pleasure (a very strange pleasure!) of being able to imagine what it would be like to live through the plague. Of course, that’s the value of historical fiction. How fun that you will get to have the author join the class!
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Rebecca, yes an enjoyable read for sure but nothing to be wowed by. It is a strange pleasure to imagine what it would have been like to live during a time like that or any historical period really. I am looking forward to her time in class. I hope she is interesting!
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I loved, really loved, People of the Book, so I was excited when my book club picked Caleb’s Crossing for one of our books. But not only did I NOT love it, I didn’t finish it, which is rare. It could be that I wasn’t in the mood for the death and sadness this time, I don’t know. But it has sort of put me off Brooks for the time being. I’m afraid you haven’t convinced me to give this one a try.
I read a wonderful history of the plague once, but I can’t remember the title right now, and it was in the bunch of books that got ruined by mold, so it may be lost to me.
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Tungsten Hippo, oh no! That’s too bad especially since you liked People of the Book so much. What a disappointment. I don’t blame you for being put off Brook after that. I read a good history of the plague in Europe a number of years go, can’t remember the title either, maybe it is the same one you read. The author took great pleasure in describing all the gruesome details which I actually found rather amusing, not the horror but his delight in it!
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I think I’ve read every book Brooks has written (mostly because my reading group tends to end up doing her novels – she’s popular with reading groups.) Of her novels my favourite is March. I think that’s because her husband is a Civil War tragic and so she really got into it – and I enjoyed the metafictional element of it. A lot of people didn’t like the ending of Year of Wonders but it didn’t worry me. People do ask her about it quite a lot. Overall, I think she’s a good story-teller and a nice writer, but not in the A-league. She is though – like Amy Tan – a really charming and interesting speaker to hear. I’ve seen her live a couple of times and enjoyed both occasions immensely.
My favourite books of hers though are her two non-fiction ones – Nine parts of desire (about her time in the Middle East – it’s her reflection on the lot of women under Islamic states. It’s probably getting old now but I would think is still relevant). She also wrote a delightful book called Foreign Correspondence (or is it Correspondent?). It’s a play on the fact that her original career was journalism and she was a foreign correspondent (in the Middle east for example!). She also had many pen pals when she was growing up and so had a lot of foreign correspondence (or correspondents!). In this book she tries to track down each one of them (in places like Israel, the US, even her home town of Sydney, and others). It’s a really lovely read – she learns about people, cultures and herself.
Sorry, this is two essay comments I’ve written in quick succession now. I. Must. Stop. It!
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whisperinggums, thanks for you take on Brooks! I agree that she is a good storyteller but not A-league. For some reason I expected she would be top notch and was surprised to find otherwise. If I ever have the chance to see her live I will be sure to take it. She will be “in” our class which means she is being filmed in the face-to-face university class and uploaded to the MOOC. I actually have her Foreign Correspondence book but haven’t read it yet. Since I had a number of pen pals when I was a kid it is an appealing read. One of these days I’ll get to it!
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Yes, I had pen pals too which is one reason I enjoyed it. I guess it might also be why we like blogging!
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WG,
Foreign Correspondence sounds like an interesting read, and I’m surprised that’s what she used to be. Reading what you said about the book makes me think of a real case. I’ve to diverge a bit here. You know the young British actress Carey Mulligan (superb in several films in recent years) got married to Marcus Mumford (Mumford and Sons) last year. They used to be pen pals when kids, lost contact, and re-united again as adults. That’s movie material! Talking about movies, I highly anticipate Inside Llewyn Davis, in which they both sing. Sorry Stefanie, some diversions here. π
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I know Mulligan – she’s gorgeous to watch – but don’t know him at all. What a lovely story!
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It took me about a decade to get around to reading Albert Camus’s The Plague, which did actually turn out to be brilliant. But after that, I kind of felt I’d ticked the plague box and that having read about one was quite sufficient. I don’t seem to feel this way about books that have bookshops or readers in them! But hey. I am delighted to know it is not an essential read. Thank you for that useful research! π
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Litlove, LOL, funny how that works, reading all sorts of books about topics you like but plague, read one don’t need to read anymore! π I’m not especially fascinated by the plague but I’d like to read Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year sometime. What’s interesting how people act in the face of disaster. I’m taking notes so I can survive a zombie outbreak or bird flu pandemic π
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I read it before blogging and was severely disappointed. I remember that everyone else loved it. Although, I don’t remember a great deal of what bothered me about it, I strangely remember a couple of scenes that created visuals in my head, and I remember being completely dissatisfied by the conclusion.
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Jenclair, I know, I thought it would be so much better since it seemed everyone loved it. Yup, the conclusion was pretty bad.
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I read this years ago and remember liking it, but it has since faded from memory. I have read a couple of her other books, too, and enjoyed them as well (Nine Parts Desire, which was really interesting and People of the Book–interlinked stories). It will be interesting hearing her talk about the book–is it an interactive sort of chat sort of set up? Please do report back–this class sounds like fun, even if the books don’t always quite click with you. Has your instructor ‘lectured’ on it also? Sometimes hearing a book described in a classroom setting gives a better appreciation, too. Or maybe not–that happens as well.
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Danielle, it was enjoyable, just not great especially since I had such high expectations. Unfortunately here talk is not interactive for the MOOC class. She will be talking to the in-person seminar that is also going on right now and I will just get to see the recording of it. The instructor doesn’t lecture on the contemporary books but on the older books Waverly, Leatherstocking Tales, etc, and on the concepts of historical fiction in general.
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