When The Wonder (2016) was first published, The Guardian called it a “…thrilling psychodrama”.
A bit generous in my opinion, and a bit misleading, as was the description which ushered me into reading this book. I always find book descriptions interesting, as they tend to vary as a manuscript passes from publisher to publisher and is listed on different sites. For example, this is a description of the book from the Amazon listing:
Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell, who believes herself to be living off manna from heaven, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensation. Lib Wright, a veteran of Florence Nightingale’s Crimean campaign, is hired to keep watch over the girl.
Written with all the propulsive tension that made Room a huge bestseller, The Wonder works beautifully on many levels — a tale of two strangers who transform each other’s lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil.
And here is the book description from the Goodreads listing:
Lib Wright, a young English nurse, arrives in an impoverished Irish village on a strange mission. Eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell is said to have eaten nothing for months but appears to be thriving miraculously. Lib’s job is simple: to watch the girl and uncover the truth.
An educated sceptic, Lib expects to expose the fast as a hoax right away. But as she gets to know the girl she becomes more and more unsure. Is Anna a fraud, or a ‘living wonder’? Or is something more sinister unfolding right before Lib’s eyes?
Written with all the propulsive tension that transported readers of Room, The Wonder asks what lengths we would go to for the love of a child.
The Amazon description begins with Anna and makes one think the book will primarily focus on her or be told from her POV. The Goodreads description, on the other hand, very clearly presents Lib as the main character and driving force in the story. As will made apparent, I believe the Goodreads description is what readers should expect.
But as we dive into this review, let the reader note that prior to reading this book, I had some preconceived understandings and personal experiences about the subject matter which have undoubtedly affected my review.
First, to address my preconceived understandings. It should be stated that I am a Protestant-leaning Christian, having grown up in an overt Catholic culture. The religious themes, ideas, and overall presentation therefore, stood out to me with special interest. I am also recovered from an eating disorder: atypical anorexia nervosa. My anorexia was extremely religiously motivated. During my recovery, I was fortunate to read the books Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia by Joan Jacob Brumberg, and Holy Anorexia by Rudolph M. Bell, both worthwhile reads. Through these books, I gained a great depth of understanding into my particular situation and in the process learned about one of anorexia’s precursors, or depending on one’s perspective, her not-so-distant cousin, the fasting girl, on which The Wonder focuses. For that reason, when I first came across the film adaptation of The Wonder, the subject matter was not at all foreign or surprising to me.
Second, personal experiences. I suppose the eating disorder and my faith should be grouped here as well, but primarily the experience which has affected my review of and journey through the book is simply that I saw the film adaption first – and it was not good. Not thrilling, not “psychodramatic” enough. Just really, really dull. But because of my aforementioned interest in and ties to the subject matter, even though I quite literally knew what was going to happen at the end, I wanted to read the book in hopes that it was better. I’m happy to report, it was.
Writing Style
While the tone and skill of the writing was perfectly fine — neither outstandingly wonderful or impactful nor distractingly awful — my commentary on the writing style is going to mainly focus on the chosen POV and its affects on the narrative.
Third Person Limited is a trickster POV. It gives the reader the sense that what he or she is reading is a true and reliable narrative, but really, it offers a narrative extremely filtered through the thoughts, feeling, and experiences of one character. I/n many ways, it’s a more pleasurable read, and especially for historical fiction, it creates an approachability to historical characters, making them feel “like us” in the way that they think and react to the world around them. When one becomes aware of the limitation, however, suddenly, it’s hard to know if that character through which we are given the story is really reliable at all.
In The Wonder, we are limited to Lib’s perspective, set up to believe what she sees and understands.
In regards to the fasting girl herself, Anna, the Limited POV nearly works. It does allow the reader to discover with Lib the trickery and/or reasoning of Anna’s four-month long fast. Where the Limited POV fails is first, in the broader context and second, in the religious aspect. I would have liked to read this story in 3rd Person Omniscient POV to go beyond Lib herself to better understand the historical time and place that could produce a “fasting girl” and the wave of awe that swept through the country because of her. For example, fasting girls were not all that rare. There is plenty of historical documentation regarding them. In fact, it would seem that the author was inspired by one such historical occurrence, albeit with a different end. The case of Sarah Jacob, the “Welsh fasting girl” lent The Wonder many details and can be read about in Fasting Girls by Brumberg as well as an online copy of the British Medical Journal from 1870, “A Continuance of the Case of the Welsh Fasting Girl”. As a historical novel, I expect and look for more context, a setting of the scene. I found The Wonder a bit too tunnel-visioned for my tastes and interests.
Similarly, because religion played such a strong part in this story — really, it was a character all its own — I believe the reader loses its nuance and complex working within this community through the Limited POV. Lib does not make secret her distaste and distrust for religion of any kind, especially that of the Christian kind. It makes her a worthwhile advocate for Anna throughout the story, but also an insufficient narrator. Through her eyes, there’s a subtle pall of bitterness towards the Christian faith thrown over the story, especially in the beginning. The Wonder involves a level of “backwoods religiosity”. Many of the characters are seen by the narrator as being unintelligent, uneducated, hopeful, mystical religious nuts, ascribing their own wrongdoing to God, forsaking their own responsibility to “test the spirits” as 1 John 4:1 instructs, and accepting oddities and even blatant deception as miracles. Most members of the faith are presented as unintelligent and against science, salivating for a miracle, hoping one might put their poor and insignificant town in Ireland on the map.
Granted, the narrator turns out to be mostly correct in her assessment, as many religious members reveal themselves to be after sainthood for the little fasting girl — the most celebrated of titles — and we can assume from the reactions of the people, the ultimate trophy for the parsonage from which the “saint” should come. In short, their desire for sainthood is selfishly motivated. Only towards the end of the novel does the Christian faith get some redemption from a certain newsman (whose character was much more believable, by the way, than in the film) as he rightly admonishes the followers of God for their faults, not necessarily God Himself.
A small handful of characters have a balance of faith and reason, but that hardly gets teased out. It’s frustrating, because the story could have been so much more complex and rich had we been able to move from Libs perspective to that of the minister Thaddeus, or even the newspaper man, Byrne, with an Omniscient POV.
Side Note: Even though there was definitely a negative slant towards historical Christianity — perhaps we should say Irish Catholicism (? )— on the whole, the book does a much better job than the movie in dealing with and revealing the religious reasoning of the characters, even if they seem unreasonable to a logical, thinking person. Through dialogue and Libs’ broadening understanding, a reader can mostly understand how certain people got to where they did in their thinking towards the fasting girl — not that understanding makes it any less frustrating to “witness”.
Plot
The plot was simple and straightforward. Again, I knew what was coming when I was reading the book, so I was not surprised. But even in watching the movie, the way the “twist” was revealed was not all that thrilling, so I can’t comment much on that.
On the whole, I can say that the author rushed or scrambled a few scenes towards the end after giving the story a laboriously slow start. I mean, a really slow start. This translated for me both in the film and the book. In any case, movie or no movie, by the time I was about three-quarters of the way through the book, I was genuinely engaged by the more detailed events, interactions of the characters and the dialogue, significantly more robust and skilled than the film. Coming from a Christian backround, none of it was surprising to me.
Characters
The film made the main character Lib out to be some laudanum-addicted loose woman. Her actions in the movie hardly give one the confidence in her ability or rationale as a nurse and decision maker. In the movie, she seems more flighty. In the book, however, even with the Limited POV, I generally trusted her to be a good nurse. Her emotions are present in the book, her hurt is there, her heart is there, but she understands in the book how to set all that aside to present herself as a professional. Most importantly (because the inner life of a character can be wildly misleading to the overall story), her actions reflect that.
As previously mentioned, the lot of religious characters making up the Watch Board, were mostly flat. I’ve read them before. I’ve seen them before.
William and Thaddeus alone stood out as somewhat surprising. They had dimension; they seemed more human. I do think, however, that the author could have developed William a bit more. Though insanely more convincing than the movie-William, I still wasn’t entirely sold on the motivations of the book-William. He remains on the fringes of Lib’s own conscious mind. Because she doesn’t really know what to make of him, the reader doesn’t get a full picture of him either. Whether this is a testament to Donoghue’s skill as a writer or weakness, I don’t know. I do wonder if a more skilled author would be able to achieve great character depth even within a Limited POV by way of seemingly inane details caught up in the main characters periphery and with clever dialogue? Instead, the reader is very much told who the characters are via Lib’s perspective. This book really brought to light for me how underdeveloped characters can feel via Limited POV. Alas.
Anna, the fasting girl herself, was unbelievable. Not in a good way. Having read accounts of fasting girls and holy nuns “blessed” with anorexia mirabilis (the miraculous loss of appetite), I didn’t find her demeanor to be consistent with historical records. Another reason this story may have benefited from Omniscient POV. The girl was too enigmatic and reflected the accounts of 15th century holy nuns as profiled and, some may say, idealized by their mentors. She’s a flat character, even in her trauma. We get very little from Anna and only care about her because Lib cares about her.
Personal Impact
Other than slightly irritating me (more for literary and religious reasons I didn’t even get into) this book had little impact on me. Emma Donoghue’s writing was enjoyable enough that I’m curious about her other books. They seem to vary widely, but I decided to try out Astray, a collection of historical fiction short stories. Though its her most well-known book, I have no interest in Room.
I suppose in the end, The Wonder more a story about Lib, and less about the fasting girl or historical time period, proving the Goodreads description to be most true. I just wanted a deeper exploration and broader landscape. Not a bad read, though. Might be dull for some who lack interest in the subject matter, intriguing to those for whom the relationship between the psychological and religious is new. Either way, better to read the book than watch the film.
2.5/5
***
Authors Note: Thank you for reading this story and we hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to hold down those little clapping hands till they hit 50 and leave your thoughts or links to stories you’ve written or think might be of interest. If you’d like to see more story-driven writing, check out the similar posts below.
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