She pushes against the restraints of her period’s sexism and religious fervor: “Faith had never had much of a hold on her over the years it had fallen away, with other childish things.” Dismissing religion as “childish” would have been a somewhat radical stance in the mid-nineteenth century. In other words, Lib is a modern woman, ahead of her time. She lives alone in London, where she works at a hospital. She is a widow and a nurse trained by Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War. In the background of Anna’s story there is Lib’s own history, another mystery slowly revealed over the course of the novel. What is going on here? Can Lib stop it and save Anna? Suspense builds as the reader assumes Lib’s anxiety and growing bafflement. As Lib’s focus turns from how to why, she tries to find clues in the girl’s meager possessions – her holy cards and other religious icons. She records Anna’s vital signs and looks for symptoms of physical decline.

Lib watches and waits, studying Anna’s room and the rest of the cottage for a food hiding place. No word or detail is wasted and tension brims in all of them. All rather primitive, but neat, at least not quite squalid.” The same can be said for an observant writer, and Donoghue is such a novelist. Some tiny doors set into the walls recessed cupboards? A curtain of old flour sacks nailed up. A painted dresser, the lower section barred, like a cage. She noted a plain table, pushed against the windowless back wall. But Lib reminds us that “for an observant nurse…time need never be wasted. This book is about waiting and watching, which could easily be as boring as it sounds. (I did.) Thus the novel opens with the question of “how?” but its real momentum builds in pursuit of “why?”Īs a writer, I was most impressed by Donoghue’s ability to take a spare setting and spin a mystery tale as riveting as The Da Vinci Code. Presumably the reader will share Lib’s skepticism. She expects to catch the girl eating furtively before the first day ends. Unlike the Irish nun who is Anna’s other nurse, Lib isn’t religious and doesn’t believe Anna’s story. Set in mid-nineteenth century Ireland, not long after the potato famine, The Wonder is a story of two heroines: Anna O’Donnell, an eleven-year-old who claims to subsist only on “manna from heaven,” and Lib, one of two nurses hired to watch Anna for a fortnight to determine if her claims are truthful. The Wonder, Donoghue’s latest novel, is also historical and fact-based. My only prior introduction to Emma Donoghue’s work was Astray, a charming collection of historical travel stories inspired by real events.

I am not one of the millions of readers who made Room a bestseller.

The wonder book by emma donoghue