Mark Porton's Reviews > Year of Wonders

I am a bit ambivalent about this story. We are plummeted into what must have been one of the darkest periods of human history. Not just because of the plague, terrible enough as it was, but because of the suffocating amount of superstition and ignorance. Let me just clarify, ignorance in the sense of not knowing about a certain thing or unusual event is fine, but creating fairy tales to explain such phenomena drives me nuts – so specifically, let’s say, witchcraft (burn her!!!!) and various flavours of dogmatic religious beliefs and practices drove me bananas. Still does.

Anna Frith is the main character here and she is a widower living in Derbyshire in the 1600s. Her small town is hit by the bubonic plague. This terrible disease with a mortality rate around 40-60% or closer to 100% if left untreated. This disease provides for an excruciating death, as the bacteria Yersinia pestis explodes into the bloodstream causing fatal septicaemias (there are other forms too – such as pneumonias and more). One notable feature is the appearance of grotesque bulbous protrusions on one’s body, often erupting and causing all sorts of unsightly and painful deaths.



People are dropping like flies. The descriptions provided by the author are graphic and grim. I found this part of the story interesting, as it provided a taste of what life might have been like. There are various characters we can hate (like Anna’s dad) and characters we can love, like our narrator - Anna.

However, towards the end of the story a few things happened that rocked my bubonic world. I did not expect some of these occurrences, in fact, I thought they were a little unlikely, unusually so. It was all a bit unsettling.

I was also a little perturbed by the first-person narrative of Anna. She often used words like “shit,” which did not work for me, as (even stated in the book) people could be put in the stocks and have rotten carrots thrown at them for swearing. Her narrative was a bit too modern, it lacked authenticity.

This was a bit disappointing as this is a worthwhile topic. Particularly considering our recent experiences with our own pandemic. But it did make me think – if COVID-19 had the same mortality rate as the plague or say the Ebola virus, we all would have been having entirely different conversations – those of us who were left.

2 Stars