The Wonder brings so many of my favourite elements together – a mystery, faith, a love story, and Ireland. It basically hit all the right notes for me. Anna is a young Irish girl, who is gaining fame for being able to live without eating for weeks. Lib, an English nurse and self-proclaimed skeptic, is hired to observe and substantiate the claims that this is an honest-to-goodness miracle. Tensions develop between Lib and Anna’s family, as well as members of the community, as she tries […]
May There Be No Frost on Your Potatoes
Though it took me a couple of chapters to get into this latest by Emma Donoghue, staying with it paid off. It’s sometime after the Crimean War and a British nurse, Lib Wright, is sent to a remote village in Ireland. Lib was trained in the “new” nursing methods by Florence Nightingale and she has been hired by a committee of locals to help verify (or disprove) that a miracle is taking place. A young eleven-year-old girl, Anna O’Donnell, stopped eating four months before and […]