The Wonder by Emma Donoghue
I think Emma Donoghue likes to think herself out of small,
tight spaces. She brought us the
bestselling Room and now The Wonder. Both stories put their characters into
incredibly small physical spaces with what seems to us impossible chances and
carries us right to the very end.
In The Wonder, English nurse Lib Wright is hired to
sit with eleven year old Anna O’Donnell. Anna, it seems to the entire
village is living miraculously without food.
She was last seen taking food four months before and has since been
living on what she calls manna from heaven.
The town council wants to make sure there is nothing untoward going on
and hires two people to sit with Anna for two weeks. Every minute and action
must be observed. Anna must be proven to
be either miraculous or cheating.
Anna and her parents live in a small, thatch roofed, dirt
floored Irish cottage in a small village. Anna is confined to the one bedroom
in the cottage. Upon meeting her for the
first time, Lib inspects every nook, cranny and crevice in Anna’s room. She restricts visits from visiting pilgrims,
fights off reporters from the newspapers and watches, along with a local nun
who is the other observer.
As the days pass, the weakened Anna grows weaker and seems
to welcome the prospect of death in atonement for her brother who died quickly
and without benefit of confession. She
believes him to be in purgatory and her actions will rescue him into heaven. No amount of begging will convince Anna to
eat a bite.
As the days pass, Anna and Lib become close, the village
elders more suspicious and the one reporter Lib uses as a sounding board starts
to make sense. And Anna grows weaker
while we watch.
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