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, more'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 following the death of his wife and the huge loss of life (half the population) that has resulted from their voluntary isolation. Anna herself suffers from her losses: she had been widowed in a mining accident before the plague arrived and her two young children died of the disease. The lady of the manor's daughter turns up demanding the parson come to see her mother - who she ends up confessing is in labour with an illegitimate child and likely to die - and is sent away in no uncertain terms by the rector, who has lost his faith.

The book then goes back to the time before the plague began, when Anna took in a lodger, a young tailor who sent for cloth to London, unwittingly importing the plague-carrying fleas that causes the whole disaster (although the 17th century characters remain unaware of how plague is transmitted). It then follows through the entire year until it once again reaches the period where the book opened.

There are a few issues as the story unfolds because very few of those who die are developed as characters beforehand, and therefore the reader feels no real connection to them. The continuing deaths become quite repetitive. The story is told in Anna's first person viewpoint and at times there's a somewhat anachronistic flavour in her views of the world, despite the attempt to have her speak in a slightly old fashioned way, with a liberal sprinkling of dialect terms which are never explained and where the meaning is often not ascertainable from the context.

However, those aren't the real problems with the book, which I found a total disappointment. Part of the trouble is that I've read a lot of history books, so certain things jumped out as wrong and derailed my belief in the story. However the entire last sequence is genuinely a car crash, as I'll come on to, but it was prefigured for me early on.

Firstly, the village originally relied for medical help on an old woman and her niece who grew a physic garden and prepared herbal remedies, and also provided midwifery services. The author's idea of these women owes more to Margaret Murray's long-discredited notion that witchcraft was a survival of ancient goddess-worship, rather than the documented evidence about 'cunning folk' as they were known (both men and women). For example, every time her characters pronounce a charm, it has a formula about being pleasing to our grandmothers. The real cunning folk recited charms that were based on Christian prayers.

Secondly, although it might seem 'obvious' to 21st century readers that the plague would be blamed on witches, from what I've read about how it was viewed from the middle ages onward, this wasn't the case: it was seen instead as God's punishment on a sinful humanity, probably because of the occasions in the Bible where He sent plagues, e.g. to the Egyptians. The kinds of illnesses and deaths attributed to witches were smaller scale and without a discernible cause - such as a sudden death (which we would recognise as a stroke, for example) or death after a lingering illness. Plague was recognised as such - as it is in this story - by its 'tokens': the buboes or swellings in the lymph nodes (neck/armpit/groin) and the 'ring-a-roses' under the skin. The sequence where the village turns on its cunning folk and murders them struck me as pure melodrama, and the author's inclusion of material from a Scottish witchcraft "confession" (as she confirms in her afterword) shows that she hasn't understood the material she researched. It would have been much more salutary to have used the documentation about English witchcraft cases, for example the Pendle witches, as the Scottish and English views on the subject were very different. For most readers I realise this is an academic point, but I almost stopped reading at that point, and the switch from actual drama to melodrama didn't bode well for the rest of the story.

Another odd scene is the one where Anna's son and his friend play with the corpses of black rats. It's true that when infected rats died, the plague-infested fleas migrated to people, but that happened in London and other places where rats brought the disease from ships at the docks etc. Here it arrives in flea-infested cloth from London so there wouldn't be any infected rats to begin with and the fleas didn't need to pop back onto rats in between, considering they gave the disease to the tailor soon enough and his customers ignored the advice Anna gave them to burn the clothing he'd made. It's as if the author read the material about the dying rats - she mentions it in her Afterword - but without understanding the sequence, so didn't realise it wasn't needed here.

The main part of the story deals with the various deaths, Anna's role in nursing the sick and her growing friendship with the rector's wife, Elinor. The two women use a book translated from Arabic into Latin - Elinor reads it although she has meanwhile taught Anna to read and write English - to teach themselves the plant lore lost when the two wise women were murdered. Eventually they manage and Anna also becomes a credible midwife. There's a slightly anachronistic element in their recognition that they need to build up the strength of the younger people who have less immunity to the plague, but that isn't too bothersome. That element of the story is quite interesting even though it comes across as the writer too-obviously showing her research, as does the chapter where the two women go down a lead mine to get an orphaned girl sufficient lead to allow her to hang onto the claim.

However, it is when things really part company from documented history that the car crash I mentioned looms. In short order, there's the improvised crucifixion of Anna's abusive father, followed by the grand guignol madness of her stepmother - dancing crazily in her house around the strung up body of her remaining child, then dragging said corpse to the outdoor 'church' the villagers have been using and attacking the rector, then cutting Elinor's throat and stabbing herself.And in the final section, there's a total rewrite of the rector's character which completely undermines the credibility of the story. I suddenly found I was reading a romance novel: after a wild ride on the moors reminiscent of Wuthering Heights, Anna returns to fall into bed with him, convinced he's the love of her life. It's literally a rude awakening when she discovers he was just getting some sex after deliberately depriving Elinor of the same for the whole of their married life while doing his best to make Elinor as lovelorn and lust-tormented as possible, all to punish her for having performed a do-it-yourself termination which had made her infertile - so hadn't she been punished enough? Granted that he's lost his faith, but it seems he didn't love Elinor anyway, so why did her death send him over the edge? No, after the strong, spiritual, caring side he's shown all throughout the novel, which allowed him to convince the villagers to go along with the quarantine despite their appalling suffering, this was a step too far. The writer would have needed the ability of a George Elliot to make that one believable.

After that ridiculous interlude, the rest is a whistle stop tour where everything bar the kitchen sink is chucked in - the attempted infanticide by the grown up daughter, of the lady of the manor's illegitimate baby, then Anna's escape with the rejected child helped by the rector who is suddenly nice again, then her being pursued by some member of the l-o-t-m's family who wants to kill both her and the baby, then life threatening storms at sea, escape to a foreign land and finally a life of fulfillment in a harem as one of the wives of an Arab doctor, where a few years later Anna is a doctor to women and is bringing up both the illegitimate baby of the l-o-t-m and her own child by the rector all of which could have constituted a novel in itself but was zoomed past in a handful of pages. Any remaining credibility went out of the window, and a book that had hovered around the 3-star mark despite the earlier clangers about witchcraft and plague vectors dropped to 1-star. A shame, because the subject matter was promising. The real-life story of the rector and his wife - the historical people on whom the characters were based had children whom they sent away before the quarantine, but the wife stayed to help and died of the plague - would have made a touching story, and we would surely have seen a man tested to the ends of his faith but somehow, it seems, still managing to cling onto it. That would have made a more enriching story than something that veered through umpteen genres including body ripper and leaves an unsatisfying impression. ( )

Anna, a miner's wife, a mother of two young sons lives through the plague in her small English village. This account is based on the story of a village that isolated itself to avoid spreading the "plague seeds" to other villages. Although it took a terrible toll on this village, their actions did save the surrounding villages. ( )

This is the second Geraldine Brooks book I have read and just like [b:People of the Book|1379961|People of the Book|Geraldine Brooks|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1442955497s/1379961.jpg|3020568] it is a warm-hearted historical page turner. The story of a village ravaged by plague in the seventeenth century is compelling and emotionally engaging. Anna Frith, the narrator and hero, is a very likeable character, with a fierce intelligence and a real personal journey over the pages. Brooks effectively evokes the brutality of life before the industrial revolution, with so much depending on luck. A woman with a good husband and good health could live quite well, but if her luck failed her in either way, she was doomed to a life of misery and struggle.

The ending of the book is somewhat baffling, slipping from drama into melodrama for the last thirty pages or so in a way that actually undermines the truth of much of what precedes it. However, this doesn't seem intentional, so I choose to judge the book in terms of its first seven eighths, rather than the last.

The prose has great rhythm and tone, with the action compelling and swift and the sadder moments much quieter and more measured. Stylistically it relies on occasional ye olde language that is probably not accurate, but helps to create the right mood regardless. ( )

Here's what I wrote in 2008 about this read: "How coinidental to read another plague-centered story so quickly. An early feminist is involved in caring for the dying around her, while searching for love (with an married village rector). Inspired by an actual village in Derbyshire." ( )

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Geraldine Brooks - Year of Wonders: This was too much horror too frequently. Maybe before the pandemic, but not now. #cursorybookreviews #cursoryreviews ( )