Year of Wonders (contains spoilers)

I love books that are so vivid I can smell the environment, that I get completely lost inside, that become so real to me sometimes I forget I'm reading fiction. I just read Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, and this was one of those books for me. Because of that, I rank it among the best books I've ever read. And part of me wishes I hadn't read it. Not now, anyway.

I won't touch Beloved either. I read it in high school and it ranks among my favorite books, but I'm not sure I'll ever read it again, now that I'm a mother. And I'm not sure I'd recommend Year of Wonders to mothers. (In fact, if you're reading this and you're in the first year postpartum, I ask you to abstain from reading it until after your baby's first birthday. Second birthday if you had any kind of PPMD.)

The reason I am not sure it was good for me/mothers is the combination of that vivid prose with the topic at hand. I knew it was going to be a dark but hopeful novel from the description: a plague-stricken village decides to quarantine itself to avoid spreading the disease. What the description left out is that the heroine, who was described as a housemaid, is a widow whose children are the 4th and 5th plague victims in the village. The way their lives and deaths were painted by Brooks will haunt me for a long time.

I felt I would have liked the warning that I would cry Where the Red Fern Grows style three times within the first third of the book.

And yet, within that, was the most beautiful depiction of motherhood and of a mother's love that I have yet to read. I'm not sure I would take that away to get these fictional dead children out of my head.

Other pieces of the book were brutal as well, but less traumatic to me.

Another interesting part of the book for me came when the village midwives/healers are killed as witches, and later, reluctantly, the heroine becomes the midwife. It made me realize that I have always been the kind of girl who would have been burnt at the stake 400 years ago: I'm a skeptic, I see things in shades of grey instead of black and white, and I've always been a bit different. Prime recipe for trial by drowning. Perhaps that is part of why I'm less daunted than others to be a midwife - a profession that is still on the fringes, still suspect, still more likely than others to get me burnt at the now-metaphoric stake (lose my license, lose everything in court, and thankfully no longer in CA but still in 24 states, get thrown in jail). I also noticed for the first time that, like my parents but few others in today's world, I am doing the same thing with my life that I would have done 400 years ago. Pretty cool!

The descriptions of birth that were in the book were overdramatized and unrealistic. I do believe that birth was more dangerous in Europe in 1660 than in most locales in 2010, but 3 out of 4 births in this book were near-death situations that were resolved in unlikely fashion. (Woman with severe blood loss to the point of losing consciousness before the baby is born, has a frank breech baby which won't come out, which is turned by internal maneuvers, comes easily once vertex, squalls immediately, and both survive. Ya may have just crossed from improbable to unbelievable, yo.) I'm working hard to forgive this aspect of the book. It's hard to imagine what the scope of a midwife would have entailed in another time, what she may have resorted to in desperation to save a mother or baby, and I wouldn't expect an author to be able to imagine in realistic terms - even if she consulted with an obstetrician, OB's likely have pretty backwards ideas of what midwives of old did. Most of them have backwards ideas of what midwives do currently!

Overall, I'd recommend this book highly to anyone who does not yet have children. To parents and especially mothers of young children, you've been warned as I wish I had been.