Information, Answers & Reviews

Year of Wonders is a book about the plague, but it is also so much more than that. Anna lives in a small village in England in 1666. She has two small children and a hard working husband. Despite her struggles with her relationship with her father, and a new minister, things are generally going well for Anna. Unfortunately the true history of the village, as discovered by Brooks, creates a tragic backdrop for Anna's fictional life. First, Anna's husband dies in a mining accident, and to help ends meet, Anna takes in a boarder from London. Shortly after this, her boarder suddenly dies, and people in her village begin falling fatally sick. The death of Anna's husband is only the beginning of the upheaval that Anna is to survive. Near the end of the book, everything that she has known was turned up on its head.

Geraldine Brooks came upon a sign at the location of the village and did quite a bit of research to create fictional characters and events. Though all the action takes place in the small quarantined village, the language is lush and the characters vivid.
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Mindy Kaling, new author of Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me, and Bill Clinton, recent author of Back To Work offer their very different, but intriguing holiday and year end book lists. I've included their top 5 lists below with links to the catalog, but click on over to the video which is interesting at least for the brief discussion on the importance of books and reading. Happy Holiday reading!  

Mindy's top list:
1. 11/22/63 by Stephen King
2. Bossypants by Tina Fey
3. Lady Gaga X Terry Richardson by Lady Gaga and Terry Richardson Read more »

I'm in the middle of season one of Nurse Jackie. This is a television show about the day-to-day life of Jackie Peyton who is a nurse in New York's All Saints' Hospital. This television show is half drama and half comedy. I don't recognize any of the actors except for Eli Wallach (Wall Street) but they are very convincing in their roles. There's quite a bit of blood and visual depictions of traumatic incidents that may bother some viewers but if you can handle that then you'll enjoy it. What keeps me hooked on the show is trying to understand Peyton's character. She's a complex union of opposite characteristics. She's happily married but having an affair. She counsels on addiction but is addicted to codeine. She's nice and shows exemplary compassion towards her patients except for the ones she hates. She's definitely a complex person. Read more »

Babe Huggins is one of those young women (my mother was one also) both lucky and unlucky enough to come of age at the start of World War II. She lives in a small New England town and because the men have left to fight overseas, she scores a department store job, and then later, interesting work at Western Union. She loves being the pulse of news in the town, but a big negative is that she is the first to discover which family has lost a young son or a new spouse.

Next to Love gives a vivid portrait of the war at home in America during WW II as lived by three friends who have known each other since first grade. Both Babe and Millie come from poor families on the wrong side of Sixth Street, whereas Grace’s family lives in one of the town’s mansions.

The novel chronicles the marriages of each of the three women, and shows how it either destroys or strengthens those unions. At the start of the war, there's one giddy summer when the number or marriages skyrockets--a combination of the men responding to the knowledge of their own mortality and the sheer lust for life-- seize this moment because no one knows how long it will last.
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