"Years of Wonders" by Geraldine Brooks is an engrossing read. This fictional account of events in the tiny English village of Eyam in the year 1666 left me with an insatiable desire to learn more about the Plague in Europe.

A young servant woman, Anna Firth, narrates the story. Anna is a full-bodied character with a strong narrative voice. However, her somewhat feminist viewpoints are hard to accept in a 17th woman. In fact, there are a few women in the book with feminist leanings, and they seemed false and contrived to this reader. This shortcoming did not spoil my reading, however.

Brooks created a complete world in "Wonders." The town and its people are well drawn. Brooks rendered detailed scenes of horrible suffering as the Plague attacks family after family.
Through Anna's eyes, we watch the village fall prey to superstitions, witch hunting, and illicit love. At times, I felt that Brooks attempted to incorporate too many Plague-related catastrophes into the story. She clearly did her research, but it seemed to me that she wanted to include everything she learned in this book, even if it meant straining the storyline a bit far.

I highly recommend this excellent piece of historical fiction. Mothers may find certain scenes emotionally challenging, so keep your Kleenex close at hand! I found that I had to put the book aside occasionally and take a break -- many scenes include raw depictions of how the Plague virus ravaged human bodies.

This was a very difficult book to read. It wasn't the use of some archaic language that made it so hard, but the heartbreaking storyline. This book is based on the true story of the villagers of Eyam, who chose to quarantine themselves from the surrounding villages in order to stop the plague that had invaded their lives from spreading. We see the entire story through the eyes of Anna Firth. We meet Anna after her husband has died in a mining accident, and she is raising two young children alone. Anna takes in a boarder to help with her expenses, laying the groundwork for tragedy, because her boarder is a tailor. One day a bolt of cloth comes from London, bearing the seeds of plague.

The year is 1666, and Anna will begin the most extraordinary year of her life, as she becomes a healer and a heroine. She will face the loss of almost everything she loves, and almost loses her own sanity during the year of the plague.

Despite the many horrors of the plague depicted in the book, there are also tiny moments of joy buried beneath the pain, and this is a book you will not soon forget.

As with most of the other reviews, my main complaint is the last chapter of the book, the Epilogue. It seemed a very jarring and rather disappointing ending to a wonderful book. However don't let that stop you from reading this book, because if you do, you will miss a beautifully written story, with a truly inspirational heroine.

Geraldine Brooks, a foreign correspondent and the author of NINE PARTS OF DESIRE shows that she can also write great fiction. This story was inspired by Eyam, a real village in England which is referred to as Plague Village. Brooks visited there several times and did extensive research for this novel.

This is historical fiction in it's purest sense. The author tells the story of one Derbyshire village that was devastated by the bubonic plague. The main character is Anna Firth, a maid in the home of the local vicar, Michael Mompellion and his wife, Elinor. When the plague arrives in the village, the vicar preaches that the town's inhabitants should seal themselves away from the rest of the country and stay in the village. As time passes, and more and more deaths occur, the villagers can no longer cope and start to become involved in witchcraft and other barbaric practices. The two women, Anna and Elinor are the true strength of the community, and learn as much as they can about herbal lore and try to ease the pain and suffering of the victims. Once into the story, I did not want to put it down. It really shows the strength of the human spirit and how we have a bond that is shared by those who went before us. Although, this is a very painful story to read, it's written well and Brooks conveys true compassion through her main characters. After reading this book, I feel like I really visited that place and that time in our history.

The ending was totally unexpected, but all things considered this is a great read and an unforgettable tale.

I have read several of Brooks' books (both her non-fiction and fiction) and I was excited to rec'e and read Foreign Correspondance. Unfortunately, I was deeply disappointed.

The book has an outstanding premise---as a child growing up in Australia during the 1960s, Brooks was eager to experience the outside world. An avid letter writer, she found pen-pals in the U.S., Israel and France. As an adult, Brooks set off to meet and re-discover these people. So far so good. But the book peters out---with the exception of the American pen-pal (to whom she was closest), the characters lack enough detail to be interesting.

Her meeting with her French pen-pal was especially disappointing. This was a girl who chose to remain in her native village (while Brooks became a world-traveler and global correspondant). I hoped for more insights and more discussion of the contrast and why they chose such radically different paths---despite coming from somewhat similar backgrounds (Brooks saw herself as living in a giant provincial village---the village of Australia). But there was little discussion and the meeting simply sounded painful. Her trip to Israel to meet her non-Jewish Israeli pen-pal would also have benefitted from a deeper discussion about one's choices and opportunities (there was some discussion of this but I wanted to know more).

Had I not read Brooks' other books, I probably would have thought this was a fairly good book. But I know she can write such a better book!

Australian born Geraldine Brooks spent many years as a foreign correspondent covering the Middle East. I loved her book, "Nine Parts of Desire" which was about Muslim women, and I have followed her life somewhat as she is often mentioned by her husband, Tony Horwitz, in his books "Confederates in the Attic", "Baghdad Without a Map," and "One for the Road." I find her an excellent reporter and in this memoir, "Foreign Correspondence," she turns the spotlight on herself.

As a child growing up in a lower middle class neighborhood on a street actually called "Bland Street", she yearned for a larger world. And so she developed pen pals. There was a girl from New Jersey, another one from France, and even one from an upper class neighborhood just a few towns away. And then there were two Israeli boys, one an Arab and one a Jew. As an adult, she found these old letters in her father's basement and, now more than twenty years later, she decided to look up each of these people. What follows is the result of her quest and some wonderful insights into world events from a personal one-on-one perspective. It was fascinating.

As a teenager in the early seventies she was aware of the new consciousness developing, even reaching her in her protective Catholic school. She had an active imagination and the gift of using words well. It's not surprising that she developed pen pals and that they influenced her life so much. Her gift of words certainly reached me too. I shared her sense of wonder and enthusiasm as she looked forward to each letter. I felt her straining to break the bonds of her loving but restrictive world. I felt her hopes and dreams and frustrations. And then, later, I shared her discoveries as she searched out the people who had meant so much to her early life. She writes with a clear voice, painting a picture with details, taking me on her quest to discover the world and eventually to discover herself. The book is short, a mere 210 pages but she sure does pack a lot into it. It's a wonderful read. Highly recommended.

I bought this as an "airplane read" but couldn't put it down. Geraldine Brooks has done us a great favor by not only illuminating the process of finding one's long lost penpals, but also by educating many folks about Australia in the process. It's fascinating to see her perceptions of the world, and particularly America, based on the letters that come in her mailbox each month.

While I read this one on my own, I have since leant this book to several friends and we've engaged in some interesting discussions about our own penpal experiences, so I recommend it for book clubs.

No one wants to hear that Muslim women are happy or that they choose, and enjoy wearing hijab. That is boring. They want to hear that we are beaten by our husbands everyday and oppressed because that is what gets good ratings and higher book sales.
I think that in any society you can focus on a few stories which would make the rest of society seem terrible to an outsider. If I wrote a book for Muslim women, I could point out the terrible numbers of women killed and raped in this country making the United States the most dangerous nation in the world to be a woman. And how pornagraphy, strip club, popular music, and films degrade women in this county where even the common name for a women among young men is "Ho".
As a Muslim woman I found a severe bias and crooked outlook in this book that focused on only the extreme stories and refused to discuss in which ways our lives are good. The assistant who began to wear hijab is seen in a bad way but many of us also made that choice and we were happy to live more deep and spiritual lives. We don't want to look like Brittany Spears, and I don't see why people in the West consider it oppression that we choose not to run around half naked but wish to remain modest and respectable. It is only a piece of cloth.....get over it. Americans focus far more on the hijab than we do.
I am happy to be a Muslim woman, and happy to cover. I think this book in many ways oppresses Muslim women because when we go out on the street here in America or try to get a job we are treated in a biased way becuase of books like this which portray a charactuture of Muslim women rather than the reality.

I picked up this book and was happy to see on the back cover that it would show how "Islam's holiest texts have been misused" and will "defy" the reader's stereotypes about their perceptions on Islam. Finally, I thought, something positive about Muslim women! But when a book starts off with an incorrect fact, you know there's something wrong right off the bat. To clarify, Brooks starts off the book with a quote from Ali ibn Abu Taleb (a quote we don't even know where she got from!) and states that Ali is the founder of the Shiite sect of Islam. Wrong! Ali died before the Shiite sect was founded and he would have never allowed for such a divide between Muslims to occur.

I won't get into a lengthy explanation of why I thought this work was lacking. I will simply quote another reader's review: "...They don't want their ill treatment tied to the Islamic religion, but as the author points out, all you have to do is read the Koran to find out that it endorses wife beating, polygamy & child marriage, says that women's testimony is worth less than men's, that women shall inherit less than men, etc., etc. The Koran clearly describes women as second -class citizens."

Now you tell me, if a reader is getting this from Brooks' book, has Ms. Brooks really done a good job of defying our stereotypes and illustrating that Islam's holiest texts have been misused (as it says so on the back of the book)? I think not. I would recommend "Daughters of Another Path" by Carol L. Anway for a more refreshing read.

For those of us who have a newly kindled (or revived) interest in the lives of Islamic women in the Middle East, this book is a welcome read. I found it as easy to devour as a novel, but full of glimpses into the lives of real women the author has encountered during travels and journalistic expeditions in the Middle East. From relationships between women in multi-wife and/or multi-generational households, to attitudes on women in education, business and sports, this book gives you a little of everything. While I still find myself confused about some of the terminology and apparel, this book made me feel like I had some grasp of the issues facing women in Islamic countries. I was particularly interested in the accounts of the author's experiences with the family of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and in the descriptions of the teachings of Mohammad as she sees them played out in the lives of Islamic women. I felt she did a pretty good job of remaining non-judgemental, especially being Jewish herself. I didn't think she was critical of Islam, as much as the way certain cultures have interpreted or distorted Koranic (?) teachings.