Or at least, that’s what she and her family claim.
As word of the girl spreads, some people believe Anna has received a divine blessing, while others claim the O’Donnells are just lying fraudsters. In order to settle the matter once and for all, a few community members decide to hire a neutral outside observer to watch Anna for two weeks and see if she actually eats or not. Thus Elizabeth “Lib” Wright, a Nightingale-trained nurse, travels from England to Anna’s small Irish hamlet.
Is Anna’s fast a hoax? Or if she truly a wonder?
The Wonder is a mystery but, in a rare turn of events, there is no murder, or even a crime. It’s about how a little girl can survive with no apparent food or drink. It’s a unique and fascinating scenario, and eventually becomes as much about who is doing this and why as much as it is about the how.
As a mystery it can stand on its own two feet, but it isn’t quite as meaty as a traditional whodunnit. But The Wonder doesn’t try to act like a pure mystery, so it doesn’t feel like it’s lacking; it also functions as a character drama. Or perhaps The Wonder does want to be a pure mystery, but it’s dedicated more than anything else to the motive and resolution, which is what all the character interaction and development over the course of the novel leads to.
The clues are there, but they may not be suggestive enough to give the reader a fighting chance at “solving” the mystery. The resolution is consistent with the foreshadowing, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually enough to lead the reader to the solution. The clues are also a bit backloaded. That being said, the conclusion is a satisfying answer to all the questions brought up by the strange premise.
Lib is meticulous, practical, efficient, arrogant and judgmental. She is a Protestant Englishwoman in deeply Roman Catholic Ireland, and clashes with nearly every other character over cultural and religious differences. She looks down on them—and is frequently put in her place for doing so. One of the most enjoyable parts of the book was discovering depth of each character that hid behind Lib’s initial, shallow impression of them.
Religion—specifically Roman Catholicism—is deeply woven throughout the book. At some points The Wonder feels a bit too disrespectful to Catholicism, and sometimes even the notion of religion and faith itself, but it’s hard to tell whether this is true disrespect or simply Lib’s point of view. Just a flag for anyone who might care about that. (And, y’know, some people might think it doesn’t go far enough.) The book also briefly gets medically intense, and goes to... quite a dark place, that I can’t clarify any further due to spoilers.
There is a lot of medical and Catholic references throughout the story. I have no idea how accurate they actually were, but they seemed appropriate and well-researched. In terms of simply consuming a story, I think that’s enough.
When I started The Wonder, I was hoping for a classic whodunnit that just happened to be about something that wasn’t a murder. The Wonder is not that. But as a lighter, character-driven exploration of a unique non-criminal scenario, The Wonder works wonders.
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