I was skeptical about this book. While I have enjoyed Geraldine Brooks’ writing in the past, I doubted that a book on the plague could be interesting. (Granted, I’d forgotten that I’d really enjoyed Doomsday Book, which is essentially a book about the plague.) Okay, so I was wrong to doubt. Year of Wonders is, while not an exquisite book, a very engaging one.

It follows Anna — a servant in the rector’s household in a fictional English mountain town (based on a real town, Eyam, in Derbyshire) — for a year, from the fall of 1665 to the fall of 1666, while her town battles the plague. Nothing new here, except that the rector — Mompellion — convinces the town to quarantine itself from the neighboring communities, thereby controlling the spread of the plague. And the book deals with the aftermath of that decision. There’s heartbreak (no mother of an infant should read the chapter where Anna’s baby dies. Much too hard.), there’s greed — both taking advantage of the ignorant and the weak; there’s anger; there’s more heartbreak. But in the end, there’s life and hope. Remarkable.

And Anna is an incredibly sympathetic main character. She’s strong, but she doubts. She does good by others, but not all the time. And she has desires, the biggest one being the will to live. Okay, I admit that she was probably more modern than the time period warrants, but for some reason this didn’t bother me. The ending — which was a bit abrupt — did bother me either. Perhaps because I’m lowering my historical fiction standards? Or maybe it was because the storytelling was so vivid that I didn’t let the little things nag at me like they sometimes do.

At any rate, it’s worth the read.