Annus Mirabilis

My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly I used to wonder if it was so because the memory of Heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go This, I thought, must be the kindness that God does for them and for us, since He gives so many infants such a little while to bide with us 1666 was not a [...]

Rarely has a book so captivated and then disappointed me with such a 180 turn to what I called utter dreckage Year of Wonders managed to do this, infortunately.In order to review, I have to break the book up between pages so that you can see where the trainwreck happened for me, and why I m so PO ed I could almost cryVIEW FOR PAGES 1 255Rating 5 stars I d give it 10 stars if had that designation, but since 5 stars means it was amazing, then 5 stars it is Year of Wonders Pages 1 255 is a beautifu [...]

I would have given this a higher rating if not for the strange ending.

After reading Long Man , by Amy Greene, not long ago.I was craving to read about another female character that might remind me of Annie Clyde Dodson I also wanted the story like Long Man to be inspired by true eventsd lastI wanted the writing to be gorgeous rich, beautiful prose.aracter drivenalisticI wanted to get in touch with that feeling which is different than the many modern contemporary novels I read YEAR of WONDER was the perfect choice satisfied what I was longing for YikesSo much is so [...]

Anna Frith resides in a remote village where a bolt of cloth delivered from London brings with it the bubonic plague Guided by a vision bestowed upon the town minister, Anna and her village elect to quarantine themselves, hoping to prevent the plague from spreading Days of quarantine turn into weeks As the months come and go, villagers grow restless Death is prevalent in every household suspicion and anger mount as villagers yearn for someone to blame for their plight Anna soon faces far greater [...]

Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks 2001 novel describes the plague years of 1666 and concludes with a very unusual and somewhat unbalanced ending While reading I thought of Arthur Miller s The Crucible and of course Camus The Plague and I forgive her much about the ending for the mention of Oran which could NOT have been coincidence This is simply, elegantly written and yet the force and brutality of the plot, told in such straightforward prose is also reminiscent of Sinners in the Hands of an An [...]

A lot of people have complained about this book being slow, but I found it beautifully paced for what it was about after 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 slowly, when people were 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 smooth [...]

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 finger pointing, people taking advantage of other s need and, above all, the need to rationalize why all of [...]

Year of Wonder offers a you are there account of the plague year of 1666 in the English countryside, seen through the eyes of Anna Frith, a young maid, widowed with two young boys The inspiration for the story is the actual village of Eyam, in Derbyshire After it was clear that the plague had set up shop in their village, the residents elected to voluntarily quarantine themselves for the duration Eyam is the only locale known to have taken on such a selfless burden And so it is with the fictitio [...]

Update Mar 29 13 I don t know why I did it, but the very fact that I did it finished this book was going to lead me to up it to three stars But now that I ve done it I M TAKING THIS DOWN TO ONE STAR HOLY MOLY AND GOLLY GEE WILLIKERS BUT I AM P.O d AT THIS BOOK None of the last 50pp new character development COMPLETELY in opposition and nonsensical to anything that went before, new sub plots suggested and followed were either necessary or sensible ALL of it was entirely a contrivance to view spoi [...]

Year of Wonders is a historical novel about a small English town 100 miles outside of London It s the year 1666, and the town has been struck by plague, brought to them by a London tailor boarding with our narrator, Anna The village is so remote that when the plague first appears the villagers don t recognize it for what it is Once they learn the horrors of the disease, the villagers are asked to make a decision whether to flee in order to save themselves, or to stay put in order to keep the dis [...]

Jedna od mojih prvih uredni kih kupovina neposredno posle Harija Potera Odli an roman o crnoj smrti, ili kugi u Engleskoj Na alost, objavljena je u pogre noj ediciji i nije joj posve ena adekvatna pa nja ali potra ite je u bibliotekama A jo bolje, pro itajte je u originalu ako ste u mogu nosti

I d like to entitle this review How I Wish I Liked Geraldine Brooks More and subtitle it for dramatic effect How I Narrowly Escaped the Plague.True story Last year, right before Labor Day here in the States, our dog became somewhat lethargic and had swelling around his neck And, though it was hot and the end of August, I was, strangely enough, simultaneously experiencing a sore throat and swollen lymph nodes.It was the Thursday before the Monday Labor Day holiday naturally when I took in our dog [...]

I have to say that I liked this book But, I was greatly disappointed in it I came to the book knowing of the sacrifice of that village and knowing, too, that when people sacrifice in such a way they are abundantly blessed by God Unfortunately, the latter was completely missing in this book It is easy to be an onlooker to suffering and assume that you ve seen the injustice and the loss and the pain and that there is nothing else to see This is not only completely at odds with everything I believe [...]

Year Of Wonders is the story of a very young, but determined and brave young widowed housemaid, Anna Frith, who view spoiler loses her two children hide spoiler to the horrors of the plague, but soldiers on to help the town minister and his wife fight the contagion while quarantined within their village.This touching and sometimes grotesquely explicit novel set in 1666 England is full of heartbreaking stories depicting unbelievable cruelty, superstitions, profiteering from the dead and the utter [...]

I loved reading this becauseI ve known the story since I was very small been to the placeThe protagonist is a poor womanThe most heroic character is a liberated womanThe most courageous characters are all womenThe author celebrates the lore and spirituality of cunning womenThe author celebrates love, loyalty and friendship between womenThe author celebrates communalist values and mutual careThe author takes witch hunting to task as a masculist power grabThe author takes Puritanism to taskThe aut [...]

SPOILER ALERT Year of Wonders is a novel inspired by the true story of the little town of Eyam in Derbyshire, known as the Plague Village, during the years 1665 1666 Although the cause of how the plague showed up in their village is still unknown, the villagers decision to quarantine themselves in order to stop the spread of the deadly disease has sealed their place in history.Geraldine Brooks provides us with a fictional account of what life looked like from within the Plague Village and gives [...]

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 view spoiler 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 thi [...]

This was a really good historical fiction book, I have never read anything from this era before It is set in 1666 and the plague is heading for a small rural village The story is told from the perspective of Anna Frith a young married housemaid with two young children This is a fascinating insight into the lives of ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances The overall concept for the book is based on a factual story of a village under siege from the plague It is difficult to imagine such [...]

The book 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 following.The story is narrated by Anna Frith, a shepherdess who also spent a [...]

I had read a couple of Geraldine Brooks essays for my Lit Theory class while I was in grad school, and while I was never one of those ultra feminist types, I liked what she wrote about women as being strong, independent and intelligent creatures without overtly politicizing femininity as a whole So I looked forward to reading Year of Wonders , primarily because I loved the topic, I loved the time period, I loved the location and because I thought Brooks would be able to impart something differen [...]

Read about it and its blows fall and fall again upon raw sorrow Its words will carry you through a patchwork of grays, for it is not just a sense of melancholy that drives the mood of this novel rather, it is an abhorrent obscurity The kind of murkiness that once upon a time, engulfed the real life villagers of Eyam, Derbyshire in the year 1665 A closely knit community of miners and shepherds and weavers, they were.Read and you will learn about their puritan ways and the plague that claimed many [...]

I enjoyed this a lot, but with some reservations First of all, I knew the basic story very well from Jill Paton Walsh s wonderful children s novel A Parcel of Patterns , so in a way, I didn t feel I was coming fresh to the book Secondly, I felt the narrator was a bit of a Mary Sue, in that she seemed to me a rabid historical fiction fan as a teenager to be an idealised version of what we think we d like to have been like if we d lived in the past Maybe that s unfair on the author someone else wh [...]

I have to admit that I have never been a huge fan of historical fiction so this is not the kind of book that I would normally read Having read several positive reviews and been impressed by the author s credentials, however, I started reading with an open mind The writing style was very welcoming and drew you in from the beginning and I warmed to the strength of Anna, the protagonist I felt however that the story became so flawed and was so inconsistently paced that by the final page I had lost [...]

4.5 A realistic, grim account of England s Great Plague of 1665 1666 as told by Anna, a very young village widow Brooks s writing is what makes this bearable and compelling to read 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.The story opens in Leaf Fall, 1666 , after the worst [...]

1666 A young housemaid walks through the empty streets of a village decimated by plague She attends to the rector, a formerly charismatic leader now sequestered in his empty house, listless and faithless The previous year a bolt of fabric from London brought bubonic plague to this remote northern village, and as one by one the villagers began to die, the rector convinced them that instead of fleeing the village and bringing plague to others who probably would drive them away anyway , they should [...]

Ah me, I m afraid I had to reach for the smelling salts many times during Brooks depiction of the plague s rampage through a small village in central England in the year 1666 The village and it s heroic decision to isolate itself to prevent the spread of the Black Death to other parts of the country is a reality The characters spring to full blown life from the author s imagination preachers, servant girls, noble people who take on the roles of heavies , Puritans, Anglicans, Ancients and childre [...]

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, 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 [...]

I honestly have two totally different ranks for this book one of the first 200 pages and one of the last fifty The last fifty pages totally ruined everything I loved about the first 200 If I weren t reading on my computer, I d throw it across the room.Year of Wonders is inspired by a true story of a village called Eyam in England, which experienced an outbreak of the plague in 1666 Our story focuses on Anna, a housemaid for the village priest, and her experiences with loss, family, and community [...]

Despite the vast majority of this story being a seemingly unending tide of death and devastation from the Plague, I absolutely loved this novel Granted I m kind of a sucker for a historical novel set in a small seventeenth century British village with medical themes and an empowered female protagonist, but this story did an excellent job of combining period details, developing compelling characters, and showing a community in an impossible situation I liked the end, though I ll admit it was awfu [...]