The housemaid who tells the story is Anna Frith, an intelligent and curious widow whose husband died in a mining accident. When you have been raised in a bare croft, eating with wooden spoons from crude platters, there are a hundred small and subtle pleasures to be garnered in the smooth slipperiness of a fine porcelain cup under your hands in a tub of soapsuds or the leathery scent of a book as you work the beeswax into its binding. At the rectory and at the Bradford’s great Hall, I found much enjoyment in the tending of fine things.
There are some who imagine that the work of a housemaid is the dullest of drudgery, but I have never found it so. Her imagery is inviting and vivid, especially her tactile descriptions of life in Eyam: There are lots of reasons to praise Year of Wonders. Throughout the book, Brooks demonstrates an impressive command of 17th-century diction, syntax, and dialogue, adding strong layers of realism from her research of the era. What she produced is an engaging story with a silly ending.
With few verifiable details about exactly what occurred in the fourteen months the residents of Eyam spent fighting for their lives, Brooks has a lot of latitude to let her imagination run wild. Upon realizing its situation, this small but noble village decided to self-quarantine in an effort to stop the disease from spreading to other communities. Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wondersis a fictionalized account of the 1665 plague outbreak in Eyam, England.
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