Take Advantage Of Year Of Wonders Envisioned By Geraldine Brooks Shared As Brochure

fascinating story, beautifully written, The ending was just perfect! Jedna od mojih prvih "uredničkih" kupovina, . . neposredno posle Harija Potera Odličan roman o crnoj smrti, ili kugi u Engleskoj, . . Nažalost, objavljena je u pogrešnoj ediciji i nije joj posvečena adekvatna pažnja, . . ali potražite je u bibliotekama, . . A još bolje, pročitajte je u originalu ako ste u mogućnosti, . . A lot of people have complained about this book being slow, but I found it beautifully paced for what it was aboutafter all, the title is "Year of Wonders," which kind of sets up an expectation and timeframe right away.
The pace helped set up a world, a time when things moved more slowly, when people were more thoughtful, when people paid attention to the seasons and nature.
This is a beautifully narrated, incredibly seamless for the amount of research that must have been put into to it, it reads so smoothly novel.
I liked the evolution of the protagonist, the way she gained power and still moved within her role in society,

That being said, the ending just friggin' killed it for me, It was totally Hollywoodized and a total cop out, At turns a romance, a horror, and an actionadventureinor so pagesbut really bad, Bad, like "Who killed Bobby Ewing" bad, Sigh. I was really pulling forhere, and then the ending is,orstar. So it averaged out to a heavily weightedstars, This is a book about the bubonic plague so I am basically expected this by the end:



Spoilers abound below along with a not insignificant amount of profanity:
So, expecting this book to be bleak, I shunted all of the emotions I anticipated feeling into the area of my heart where I keep my New York Mets fandom.
You know, these guys:





Sufficed to say their years of incompetence and disappointment have formed a nice level of scar tissue over that part of my metaphorical heart.
So whatever this book was going to throw at me I knew it wouldn't sink its emotional claws into me,

That being said, fuck this book, It was a never ending parade of despair, death, exploitation, inhumanity, and suffering with a little dash of hope thrown in every so often to make the subsequent despair, death, exploitation, inhumanity, and suffering that much worse.
I swear, the town this takes place in based on an actual town, sitelinkEyam must have killed the writer's grandmother considering the amount of suffering she heaps upon the inhabitants.
If I wanted this level of depression I would just read a nonfiction book about the plague,

Look, I understand that this book was about a horrible situation, The town voluntarily and, might I had, quite nobly secluded itself from the outside world once it was clear they were infected with the Bubonic plague not the Black Death vintage, but one of the later outbreaks called sitelinkThe Great Plague of London.
And yes, under those conditions some pretty terrible stuff will and did happen,

My issue with this book, though, was how the author presented the situation, Like I said, it was a never ending parade of death and despair, I was often introduced to families with the preface that they had already lost X amount of children plus one or both of the parents.
I can feel bad for them on an abstract level, but if I didn't know them before hand it is difficult for me to rouse much emotional connection with them.
They are just another set of future or existing corpses that I shouldn't bother getting to know or care about,

There are a few characters we get to know quite well,

Anna, the narrator, A peasant women in the employ of the local rector and widow to a local miner with two children, Michael Mompellion, the local rector and moral backbone of the community who proposes the the self quarantine, Elinor Mompellion, the wife of Michael who is a positive force to be reckoned with, Extremely empathetic, very hands on when it comes to problems, and generally a wonderful woman,

We are also introduced to some other characters as well: Anna's father and stepmother, the Gowdies a Aunt/Niece pair who have extensive herblore and the Bradfords local well to do family.


So, some of the terrible things that the author heaps upon the reader:
The lynching of the Gowdies because people thought they were witches.
There goes just about all of the herblore for the village, forcing Elinor and Anna to learn everything on their own.

Drug abuse poppies in this case
Child abuse
A crude form of crucifixion of Anna's father after he tries to kill someone in order to claim the victim's goods as payment for digging a grave the previous person who did that died of a heart attack from overwork, another cheery note.

Anna's step mother, Aphra, going crazy from grief both from losing her own children yes, lots and lots of children die and having her husband die from the aforementioned crucifixion after Anna does not go to free him she expected Aphra to do it but Aphra was at her home taking care of her children who all came down with the plague in shortly after the crucifixion.
Aphra begins to masquerade as the ghost of one of the Gowdies, selling people fake supernatural remedies,
Child sacrifice
Families felled in such numbers that the village runs out of consecrated ground
Despair that drives some folks to selfflagellation
Attempted infanticide
Unnecessary mention of the slave trade.
Not because the practice didn't occur, but because of all the other terrible things that have happened why include yet another terrible aspect of humanity during this time on top of everything else as part of a throw away line
Elinor, whom we know at the beginning of the book is dead, comes down with the plague.
So while you expect her to die she makes a recovery, Sounds good right Nope, she gets killed when Aphra goes even crazier and stabs her to death in front of what is left of the village.

The Rector, Michael, after being a pillar of strength for the community, is broken by the death of Elinor and loses his faith can't really blame him for that.
But after hooking up with Anna biblically speaking he reveals that he never had sex with Elinor as a punishment for her sin of killing her outofwedlock child in the womb using a heated iron brand no less.
He specifically said that he strove to make her love him more and more so that his withholding of sex would hurt her that much more.
Talk about a stone hearted, crazy religious zealot son of a bitch, Of course, because Anna become such good friends with Elinor and we see how great of a person Elinor is, this comes off as even more depressing and is a completefrom his previous personality to the point where it felt very jarring.


So like I said, this book was fucking bleak, Everyone I was introduced to ended up dead, crazy, or deeply emotionally scarred or were just terrible people to begin with.
By the end we were left wwith this:



Yes, the ending was sort of happy if you ignore the mountain of corpses you had to climb over to get there, but Michael's crazy genes got passed on to another generation and the happiness lasted all of three pages before the book ended.


There are ways to write bleak, depressing stories that don't involve constantly hitting the reader over the head with all the terrible things happening.
After the third or fourth family is wiped out by the plague, the marginal emotional impact of each subsequent family death is extremely low.
By the time I was halfway through the book every terrible thing the author dumped on poor Anna or the village just elicited a heavy sigh, not unlike the sighs I utter when the Mets once again find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.


Upon final analysis this book failed for me because I did not resonate emotionally with any of the characters and the never ending parade of death and destruction just sort of numbed me to the entire experience.
Family of seven wiped out by the plague How passe, Drowning a baby Par for the course, Crazy lady with a giant knife that slays the most beloved character in the village Not terribly surprising, Religious man turns out to be a heartless selfrighteous jackass Certainly surprising, but completely undercuts any good feelings I had towards him this entire book.


If you are interested in seeing a community collapse and die off from a plague and their own inhumanity, you might like this book.
The writing and descriptions are quite sharp and well crafted, just expect a windmill full of corpses by the end, I would have given this a higher rating if not for the strange ending, Year of Wonders tells the story of Anna, a servant to a pastor, and how she emotionally and physically survives the plague while the majority of her village falls ill around her.


I was enthralled, I listened to the audiobook on my daily commute and it was fantastic,

You get the very real drama of life in a small village mixed with the the despair that must have accompanied the plague.
There's fingerpointing, people taking advantage of other's need and, above all, the need to rationalize why all of the deaths were occurring.


My favorite part of this book was when Anna stopped in the middle of her hectic life to reconsider how she viewed God.
She uses common sense reasoning to pick apart why a deity would allow such tragedy to occur and then wonders why the young are taken rather than the old.


She comes to the conclusion that what's happening is a biological thing rather than a divine thing, Then, once she has that straight in her mind, she's better equipped to handle everybody else's irrational responses to the plague without being bogged down by her own.


Anna is a great heroine, She has her flaws a flirtation with opium addiction to dull her grief and a crush on someone else's husband but she tries to be a good person.
Mainly, she's just overwhelmed by what's going on and wants to feel loved and safe,

She cares for the ill, helps an orphaned child hold on to her family's lead mine and tries to help

her village keep body and soul together.


The ending of Year of Wonders was incredibly shocking to me, but in a good way, Geraldine Brooks stayed true to her characters but took the story in such an unexpected direction, that I had to turn it off for awhile to absorb what I had just heard.


Highly recommended for book clubs or people who love historical fiction, Year of Wonders is wonderous indeed, .