Book review: ‘The Wonder’ by Emma Donoghue

There is a film adaptation, but read the book first: you won’t be able to put this page-turner down until the very end!

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An English nurse gets a curious invitation to spend several weeks in a remote Irish village. Her one and only task is to monitor an 11 year-old girl who allegedly hasn’t eaten anything in four months. Having worked under Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War, the nurse – Lib Wright – is a highly experienced and very rational person, but still unprepared for what she is about to witness. The child claims to live solely on ‘manna’ from heaven, as she describes it, and there’s nothing to disprove her supernatural claims. 

Is this a genuine miracle resembling those of some of the medieval female mystics, or an elaborate hoax?

Emma Donoghue’s novel The Wonder paints the image of post-famine rural Ireland of the 1850s as a desolate, desperately poor and backward country, ruled by superstition and folk Catholicism. This serves as more than a fitting background to this psychodrama in which the wider national disaster translates into messed up family dynamics and a morbidly distorted sense of religiosity. It is not a flattering portrayal of Ireland, nor of the Catholic Church; least of all of the ‘traditional family’ as the locus of oppression and trauma.

While dealing with extremely difficult and upsetting subjects, the author doesn’t succumb to cheap thrills of overly graphic descriptions. The novel is a suspense story more than anything else: although the plot is somewhat predictable, the eerie atmosphere of the miracle girl’s home is sustained throughout. 

Not having seen the film adaptation yet, I can only hope it did justice to the strong gothic vibe of the book.

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‘The Wonder’ by Emma Donoghue was first published by Little, Brown and Company in September 2016; 304 pp.

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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Emma Donoghue’s talk about the women who inspired The Wonder

Is The Wonder based on a true story?