...[an] exquisite new novel ... These rooms of Donoghue’s may be tiny and sealed off, yet they teem with life-and-death drama and great moral questions ... Donoghue manages to engage these larger mysteries of faith, doubt and evil without sacrificing the lyricism of her language or the suspense of her story line. Anna may or may not be a genuine 'living marvel,' but The Wonder certainly is.
...a fine work, adept and compelling in voice, plot, and moral complexity ... Donoghue tightens the tension, gradually adding small elements that in the end will come together in a sad and frightening picture, one tinted with the dark shades of Ireland’s brand of misogynistic, flesh-denying Catholicism ... Donoghue deals out the cards with real skill. If the ending itself does not seem entirely believable, I, at least, could not have wished it arranged otherwise.
The Wonder is a narrative vortex within which the old authority of religion and the new authority of science are simultaneously shattered … Donoghue’s decision to invent an Irish fasting girl in 1859 allows her to evoke a religious and spiritual culture within which extreme fasting could still be viewed as wondrous rather than pathological … The perversity of self-starvation in a setting where the Irish Potato Famine claimed a million lives from 1845 to 1852 is subtly handled by Donoghue. Lib is irritated by ‘Mr. Eliot’s moralizing’ in Adam Bede, and Donoghue avoids any moral comment on her character’s refusal of food in a country so recently blighted by famine … The Wonder recalls the claustrophobia of Room and is in some respects a more self-consciously literary repetition of its best-selling predecessor.
After making my way through several recent novels written in tiresome hey-look-at-me prose, The Wonder arrived as a welcome relief. Donoghue’s prose is as sturdy and serviceable as a good pair of brogans, but never nondescript. There are occasional flashes of lyricism but Donoghue’s main purpose here is story, story, story, and God bless her for it ... Anna’s plight and Lib’s efforts to save her (initially reluctant, ultimately frantic) make this book, flawed though it is in some respects, impossible to put down ... less palatable is the distracting romance Donoghue loads onto the second half of her tale ... flaws, but not fatal ones. For the most part, The Wonder is a fine, fact-based historical novel, an old-school page turner.
Donoghue has developed something of a specialty in putting children in situations of harrowing confinement ... She enjoys doing her research, and it shows. The difficulty, as with any work of historical fiction, is in getting the facts to hum and resonate in our contemporary minds, to illuminate our own mysteries. Perhaps that’s why the explanation for Anna’s fast, when it finally comes, is given in terms of trauma at last dredged up...It’s a revelation that accounts for everything and, for that reason, feels unsatisfying, minimizing of the unfathomable nature of Anna’s feat. History’s anomalies are clipped to fit our own diagnostic sense of the world.
[Donoghue] has taken the bare bones of an idea and turned into a full-fledged story about, among other things, the thawing of a woman’s frozen heart. She’s done it in clear, precise cool prose, so we can follow the shifts in Lib’s logic and feeling ... Like Ms. Donoghue’s best-selling Room, the novel ultimately concerns itself with courage, love and the lengths someone will go to protect a child...The feeling is heartbreaking and transcendent and almost religious in itself.
...the first half is indeed a deliciously creepy gothic cocktail, enticingly set up and chillingly, suspensefully dragged out ... [Lib is] drawn as an intelligent young woman, refreshingly (in this oppressed and superstitious community) atheist, questioning and curious. So why, again and again, does she fail to ask the glaringly obvious questions that might get her somewhere?...Lib seems relentlessly blind to well-strewn clues and so prone to jump to wrong conclusions that at times the narrative takes on a 'he’s behind you!' quality that only undermines its otherwise very promising creepiness ... Which is perplexing, because there is so much to enjoy here. Donoghue weaves crunchily convincing period detail through a pacy narrative with relish and aplomb.
... suspense novel that lacks much in the way of suspense, a psychological thriller that's more laughable than scary ... The reader knows that Lib is skeptical because Donoghue hammers the point home with a heroic lack of subtlety ... The Wonder is as phoned-in as a novel could be. Her writing is flat and repetitive, and the plot, such as it is, is maddening. Fans of Room might find something to be interested in here, but for everybody else, it's just another entry in the ever-growing catalog of mediocre suspense novels about children in pain.
[Donoghue] deftly recreates the country’s historical landscape. The book is impressively textured with the breadth of her voluminous research ... The novel rests on a series of carefully timed revelations, and its conclusion is likely to be polarizing; it seems deliberately crafted, in fact, to be controversial ... it’s tempting to read into Donoghue’s vast ecology of metaphors a troublesome import: that childlessness is a kind of starvation, a willful spiritual emptiness.
Ms. Donoghue, a native of Dublin, is strikingly harsh in her depiction of the Irish; most are caricatured as blindly superstitious bog dwellers. But Anna receives the author’s full sympathies and is a lively, endearing foil to her incredulous nurse ... As in Room, Ms. Donoghue proves a shrewd observer of the parental urge to distort reality to protect children—and themselves.
Donoghue draws out the narrative suspense with her customary combination of historical verve and emotional delicacy, as the mystery becomes not so much what is happening beneath Lib’s nose, but why ... Like Room, this is a thrilling domestic psychodrama that draws its power from quotidian detail as well as gothic horror...But Donoghue also sets Anna and Lib’s relationship in a wider context: of English and Irish antagonism, of the birth of nursing, of the clash between science and faith.
Donoghue, a prolific researcher with a Ph.D. in English, weaves all of this suggestive history into a fable as lean and discomfiting as Anna's dwindling body ... Donoghue keeps us riveted to Lib's perspective throughout, and the close-lipped Irish look hopelessly backward to Lib's educated, colonial-British gaze; yet the shadow of the Irish potato famine, an atrocity perpetuated by the English on Irish subjects, haunts this novel about hunger ... the suspense in The Wonder sometimes resembles suspended animation; only its near-claustrophobic economy makes it hard to put down.
...the novel unfolds with exquisite suspense. Though there seem to be three possible resolutions—Anna is a fraud, Anna is a miracle, Anna is being manipulated—I had no inkling of where it all might end up. As in her 2010 novel, Room, Donoghue masterfully creates drama within small domestic spaces ... Compelling is the puddled, peaty landscape that Donoghue paints, riddled with mystery and tinged with tragedy ... Listening to Lib denigrate everyone around her is tiresome, especially when it's so obvious we're not meant to agree. Still, we are swept away by the story. In creating a world and immersing us, The Wonder is a great success. But in answering some of the finer questions Donoghue raises—particularly with regards to Lib's disregard for the Irish—the novel falls short.
The unraveling of the mystery here will bring into play another Donoghue obsession, something even creepier than superstition and ignorance. As much as we can count on her to plumb the heart of human darkness, Emma Donoghue loves a happy ending. Readers who feel the same will enjoy the blaze of romance and drama she ignites to end Lib’s Hibernian adventure.
These [first] hundred pages are somewhat monotonous, with lots of fist-shaking frustration and comically thorough searches for hidden food ... As she starts caring for and believing her — if not her freedom from hunger, then her belief in her freedom from hunger — the book gets a lot more interesting, plunging into a rich Irish bog of religion and duty and morality and truth ... The book takes some predictable Hollywood turns, but its dramas and details are sharply unique. Dark and vivid, with complicated characters, this is a novel that lodges itself deep.
The Wonder is both an excoriating meditation on the malignant folly of fundamentalism — not least where women are concerned — and a whodunnit. Perhaps inevitably, one succeeds rather more than the other. Donoghue’s great skill is in trapping the reader alongside Lib in that sordid little cottage ... Donoghue’s measured prose is at its best when depicting damaged and failing flesh with extraordinarily vivid economy.
Donoghue excels at depicting the sickroom: the erratic compression and expansion of time, the unique combination of tension, boredom, fear and confusion ... So many things are right in this novel that I wished — almost angrily — that a few things had been better, most particularly the dialogues in which characters tell each other things for no reason except that the reader needs to know them. And the ending struck me as contrived ... The bottom line: Read it. The important things will stay with you while the clumsy ones will fade from memory.
...a compelling return to historical fiction for Donoghue ... In her deceptively straight-forward prose, Donoghue masterfully unravels a tense gothic page-turner in which nobody, including the unreliable nurse narrator, are entirely what they seem. A powerful exploration of religion and the sway it holds, The Wonder is equal parts psychological drama and unorthodox love story. A thoroughly enjoyable read from one of the country’s premier storytellers.
Donoghue has a knack for enchanting phrasemaking ... She also has an uncanny way of making her tale (inspired by a number of historical cases of so-called Fasting Girls in the British Isles) both intimate and enormous ... The Wonder — the book — just takes up a tiny space. But, like all good books, it’s a world.
Fans of Room will have a similar takeaway here with the dynamic between Lib and Anna that Donoghue captures so well. She understands the voice of a child, and makes Lib all the more engaging for not having her talk down to her charge ... If you’re looking for a mystery with palpable atmosphere, this is a good read. It has a strong, quick-witted female lead out to uncover truths, and the period details lend a nice degree of verisimilitude.
