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jenkepesh 's review for:
The Wonder
by Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue is of course the author of the widely acclaimed Room, a book I would not be able to read due to its subject matter. But I've read reviews, and her reputation led me to The Wonder. It wasn't my cuppa....
In this book, a British Florence-Nightingale-trained nurse with battlefield experience has been hired for a two-week task in Ireland: in partnership with a nun with nursing experience, to keep close eye on an 11-year-old girl who has apparently been miraculously fasting for four months, to see if they can confirm or disprove the claim. What is apparent is that the child is both fanatical about observing the fast and that she is starving herself. Why those around her can't see the imminent danger, why the child is willing to die for the sins of the dead, why those who do understand the danger are torn about how to react, the real reasons behind the fast are the plot points that propel the novel.
So, a suspense book of sorts, enjoyable on its own terms.
Except for my expectations and ultimate enjoyment, what doesn't work:
--Lib, the nurse, arrives in Ireland with such deep-seated prejudice against the Irish and against Catholicism that she is rendered less sympathetic to me than those who certainly deserve reader suspicion and censure. Her judgment replaces thoughtful character development of most other characters, who seem mere props for the plot.
--While the story is told in third person, it is close third person, and as clues pile up (from the first pages), Lib is remarkably blind. Is Lib's objective training helpful in assessment? Not really, not even as a nurse. Is she the prejudiced outsider condemning a world she doesn't understand? Yes, except that because of her outsider perspective, she's eventually able to understand why a child can be considered a saint for starving herself, by understanding how the normalization of events in previous years by a society numbed by a famine and still highly superstitious and religious can know monstrous things but not see them as monstrous, or even pertinent.
--This last point would be more interesting if it wasn't, sadly, such common territory for Irish writing. There was Frank McCourt's memoir, Angela's Ashes. There was the more recent telling of benighted Ireland, John Boyne's The Heart's Invisible Furies. (I don't warm to either of these books, as both feel too exploitively overwrought.) There was, on the other hand, the excellent Milkman, by Anna Burns. And The Wonder is too akin to McCourt and Boyne, too akin to child-in-jep.
--Expecting a book from an author so deeply admired to be exceptionally well-written, I am bummed that it is competent domestic thriller.
In this book, a British Florence-Nightingale-trained nurse with battlefield experience has been hired for a two-week task in Ireland: in partnership with a nun with nursing experience, to keep close eye on an 11-year-old girl who has apparently been miraculously fasting for four months, to see if they can confirm or disprove the claim. What is apparent is that the child is both fanatical about observing the fast and that she is starving herself. Why those around her can't see the imminent danger, why the child is willing to die for the sins of the dead, why those who do understand the danger are torn about how to react, the real reasons behind the fast are the plot points that propel the novel.
So, a suspense book of sorts, enjoyable on its own terms.
Except for my expectations and ultimate enjoyment, what doesn't work:
--Lib, the nurse, arrives in Ireland with such deep-seated prejudice against the Irish and against Catholicism that she is rendered less sympathetic to me than those who certainly deserve reader suspicion and censure. Her judgment replaces thoughtful character development of most other characters, who seem mere props for the plot.
--While the story is told in third person, it is close third person, and as clues pile up (from the first pages), Lib is remarkably blind. Is Lib's objective training helpful in assessment? Not really, not even as a nurse. Is she the prejudiced outsider condemning a world she doesn't understand? Yes, except that because of her outsider perspective, she's eventually able to understand why a child can be considered a saint for starving herself, by understanding how the normalization of events in previous years by a society numbed by a famine and still highly superstitious and religious can know monstrous things but not see them as monstrous, or even pertinent.
--This last point would be more interesting if it wasn't, sadly, such common territory for Irish writing. There was Frank McCourt's memoir, Angela's Ashes. There was the more recent telling of benighted Ireland, John Boyne's The Heart's Invisible Furies. (I don't warm to either of these books, as both feel too exploitively overwrought.) There was, on the other hand, the excellent Milkman, by Anna Burns. And The Wonder is too akin to McCourt and Boyne, too akin to child-in-jep.
--Expecting a book from an author so deeply admired to be exceptionally well-written, I am bummed that it is competent domestic thriller.