Genre: Novel
Grade: A-
Notable People: Geraldine Brooks
Title: A Year of Wonders
Review This is a boo I almost quit on in first fifty pages; it’s about a year of the Plaque in Devonshire, England in the 1660s. Beautifully told by the heroine feminist before her time in a world that did not bless such woman. The book is haunting, elegiac, and enormously hopeful. With some really good twists at the end. You’ve got to be ready to deal with a lot of death and hardship to read this one- but I found it somehow uplifting. I believe it is Brooks first novel and she’s’ a good one; a war correspondent in all the Middle East hot spots, she was on break in rural England when she came to be in the town of Eyma- which had the true story of being the center of the Plaque and a place that through their spiritual leader cut themselves off from everywhere else for one year to avoid passing on the disease. An amazing story and once you find out it is basically true, in the afterward…even more amazing.