The Wonder

by Emma Donoghue

An eleven-year-old girl stops eating, but remains miraculously alive and well. A nurse, sent to investigate whether she is a fraud, meets a journalist hungry for a story.

Set in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s, Emma Donoghue's The Wonder - inspired by numerous European and North American cases of 'fasting girls' between the sixteenth century and the twentieth - is a psychological thriller about a child's murder threatening to happen in slow motion before our eyes. Pitting all the seductions of fundamentalism against sense and love, it is a searing examination of what nourishes us, body and soul.

• ISBN10: 1509818391
• ISBN13: 9781509818396
• Publish Date: 22 September 2016 (first published 20 September 2016)
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Out of Print: 26 January 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Imprint: Picador
• Format: Paperback (UK Trade)
• Pages: 256
• Language: English

Reviews

[gmcgregor]

The tension between science and faith is a very salient one and it is exactly this that drives a lot of the action in Emma Donoghue's The Wonder. Florence Nightingale-trained English nurse Lib Wright is sent out to a village in rural Ireland to help determine what is going on with 11 year-old Anna O'Donnell. The claim is that the child hasn't taken any earthly nourishment since her birthday...four months prior. Lib and another nurse, a nun, are engaged by a council of local citizens to monitor little Anna in shifts, to watch her for two straight weeks to see if her claims are true or if she has, in fact, been eating somehow.

Lib, coming from a more scientific perspective, is sure that the child has been consuming food. She's suspicious of her fellow nurse and the entire O'Donnell family because of their Catholicism, which she believes blinds them to the reality that bodies need food to continue functioning. She institutes strict control over Anna's routine immediately, stopping a flow of visitors that have come to see the little miracle girl. But over the first week, she softens toward the girl herself even as she continues to try to figure out how she's eating. Anna is a sweet, obedient, faithful child, still mourning the recent loss of an older brother, her only sibling. She finds herself wondering if it might somehow be real, if maybe Anna is surviving off of what she says she is: manna from heaven. But Anna starts to take a turn for the worse, and Lib has to figure out what's going on and if she can somehow be saved.

This book was such a disappointment. It indulged in what is one of my least favorite plot devices...to create tension and an atmosphere of suspense, it backloads all the payoff into the end of the book. So, basically, it crawls along with about 25% for about 75% of the book, and then stuffs the last 25% of the book with 75% of the plot. I've never enjoyed consuming books or movies that do this, I think it's a sign of lazy storytelling (which is probably why I don't read a lot of mysteries or thrillers, because it's much more common in those genres). In this case, some of that stuff did need to be left until the end, but there were some revelations about Lib's personal life that could have provided some badly-needed character development up front without compromising the reveals toward the end. And that's not the only example of lazy writing: when a sparkly-eyed, charming reporter shows up at the same rooming house Lib is staying at, it would take an idiot to not recognize that he's going to be a love interest, which is of course exactly what happens. And though good quality prose could have done a lot to make the story flow more smoothly, Donoghue's writing is utilitarian at best. I did not enjoy reading it and would not recommend it.

[elvinagb]

I really liked this book but after having finished it last night I'm not really sure about the ending. It's one of those books where you are happily reading along and suddenly it's the end of the story and feels like the author wasn't quite sure how to finish.

[clementine]

Wow, I loved this. Definitely more than Hood and possibly more than Room, though it's tough to say since I read it 5 years ago.

I read The Wonder in one sitting though I hadn't intended to - that's how gripping I found it. It's strange, since not much happens throughout most of the novel, but it was utterly fascinating. The characters were compelling and the mystery of it all had me hooked. I loved the major themes at play, specifically complicity through inaction, the downsides to religious fervour, and the ways in which sexism can be deadly. And I even liked the end, though I'm picky about endings!

Definitely another great book from Emma Donoghue, whose work I enjoy and who I greatly admire.