Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

to my astonishment she took it and blew her nose as indelicately and unselfconsciously as an urchin.

Me tbh

There was something in her that could not, or would not, see the distinctions that the world wished to make between weak and strong, between women and men, laborer and lord.

Love a 1665 feminist

I liked her, too, because it takes a kind of courage to care so little for what people whisper, especially in a place as small as this.

A good infusion would have served George better than the empty mutterings of a priest.”

Facts!!

I at last found the will to toss the dress he had made for me into the grate, golden-green gashed by flames of bright vermillion.

See and she lived because she sacraficed

It announced itself by smell long before you could catch sight of it. Sometimes sickly sweet, sometimes astringent, the scents of herbal brews and cordials wafted powerfully from the precincts of the little home.

I want to go to there

wash over me like the twittering of birds in a distant thicket.

The writing is beautiful i love how detailed and creative the descriptions are

herb-stuffed masks contrived like the beaks of great birds.

This explains the plauge doctor costume

A layer of bodies, a few spades of soil, and then more bodies tumbled in atop. They lie there so, just like yonder dessert.” He pointed at the layered cake,

Sounds like a threat to publkc health

“We all begin as naked children, playing in the mud.”

Alexander Hadfield was a fastidious man

I appreciate the detail on each character

The woodpile’s full of them, seemingly. All dead, thanks be for small mercies.”

Oh... I fear you should not be happy theyre all dead

my house, the fleas feasted on my tender children, leaving them covered in madding welts.

Sounds like a great way to catch a disease

Young Edward Cooper is burning up with fever, so I’m bringing him a draught.”

Oh no

The poor little soul was covered in squirming leeches, their sucking parts embedded in his tender arms and neck,

Leeches on the neck sounds dangerous and this seems unnlikely to help

“He is a small child, so we need not draw overmuch to restore the balance of his humors,”

Never understood where the humor system idea came ffrom

My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly. I used to wonder if it was so because the memory of Heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go.

When I lifted him from her lap and laid him upon the pallet, his skin had lost its livid color and felt cool to my touch.

Its interesting because we know now that fevers are good for fighting infection

But I cannot tell you what was said, in the church or at the graveside, save for the line “In the midst of life, we are in Death,” which did indeed seem to me to be the whole description of our plight then.

I wished I could talk to that long-ago craftsman. I wanted to know how his people had coped with what God had sent them.

“Yes,” she said, her voice deep and uncanny, “I am the Devil’s creature, and, mark me, he will be revenged for my life!”

Shes so cool for that

“Every wife has said that her pleasure is extreme, far greater than with any of you!”

Love her

brought her down with a blow. He grasped her hair and pulled her face up from the ground, rolling her over like a meal sack. “Is it true?” he yelled, his knuckles bunched tight and poised above her. “Did you lay with Satan?”

Okay so thats crazy

Why, I wondered, was God so much more prodigal with his Creation? Why did He raise us up out of the clay, to acquire good and expedient skills, and then send us back so soon to be dust when we yet had useful years before us?

It is natural to want to forget, Anna, when every day is a brimful of sadness. But those souls also forgot those that they had loved.

how futile it is to wallow in regret for that which cannot be changed

How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst.

in my own unexamined way I had believed that, working in their house and seeing to their needs, watching their comings and goings and their dealings with others, I had come to know them. How little, how very little, that knowledge had really amounted to.

How was I to face the days and nights to come? There would be no other relief for me; in my two hands I held my only chance of exit from our village and its agonies. But then I realized that this was not quite true. There was our work. I had seen that afternoon how it was possible to lose myself in it. And yet this loss of self was not selfish oblivion. From this study and its applications might come much good.

Perhaps the Plague was neither of God nor the Devil, but simply a thing in Nature, as the stone on which we stub a toe.

It became impossible for me to look into the face of a neighbor and not imagine him dead.

No one man, no matter how wise or well-intentioned, can ever judge perfectly in all matters.

After so many unanswered prayers, I had lost the means to pray.