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The Wonder cover art

The Wonder

By: Emma Donoghue
Narrated by: Tara Egan-Langley
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Publisher's Summary

A major film from the makers of Normal People and Room, starring Florence Pugh and streaming on Netflix.

Eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell stops eating, but remains miraculously alive and well. A nurse, sent to investigate whether she is a fraud, meets a journalist hungry for a story . . .

Set in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s, Emma Donoghue's The Wonder – inspired by numerous European and North American cases of 'fasting girls' between the sixteenth century and the twentieth – is a psychological thriller about a child's murder threatening to happen in slow motion before our eyes.
©2016 Emma Donoghue (P)2022 Macmillan Publishers International Limited
Literary Fiction Psychological Historical Fiction Women's Fiction
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Critic Reviews

Emma Donoghue's writing is superb alchemy, changing innocence into horror and horror into tenderness (Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife)
Fascinating . . . Like The Turn of the Screw, the novel opens irresistibly, when a young woman with a troubled past gets an enigmatic posting in a remote place . . . Heartbreaking and transcendent and almost religious in itself (Sarah Lyall)
A fine, fact-based historical novel, an old-school page turner . . . Donoghue has written, with crackling intensity, about [spirituality's] power to destroy (Stephen King)

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Why won’t she eat, let me count the ways

I enjoyed Room, so was intrigued to read The Wonder. And while it finished well (thank god), the pay off for my patience barely made up for 6 hours of deliberation on why little Anna won’t eat (aka the old “slow build”). Problem is, this painstakingly slow build is not so much a build as an plateaued excuse to string along the reader to make what really is a very short story, into a novel length longer one. So I can only recommend it for those with the patience of a saint.

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Not such a great read

I was very disappointed by this book. The first seven chapters were excruciatingly repetitive and boring. The rest of it was unrealistic and drawn out and boring.
Thumbs down from me

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