The Wonder

The Wonder: Emma Donoghue

Hello everyone! I have been gone for so long and I am so sorry!! I honestly have no excuse but I’m going to try to give you one anyways! I got busy with my jobs and trying to get some passport things figured out and life just got insane for a while. But I’m back and I’m ready to tell you about this novel.

So this book was big when it came out and I was finally able to get it from the library and I thought it had a really interesting concept and execution. So this is about a little eleven-year-old girl from Ireland who has allegedly been fasting for four months. Her story has reached the media and people want some kind of validity to this story that a person, let alone a little girl, is able to survive on nothing. For four months! So Lib, a nurse who studied under Florence Nightingale, is hired to keep watch over the girl along with a Nun to take on the alternative shifts.

This was such an interesting book in the way that the book was set up as a mystery and psychological thriller. I was interested from page one but I have to say that I didn’t get invested for a bit. The concept of this book was interesting for me that I kept pushing through the slow beginning but when the mystery really started getting serious of how was this little girl surviving?? I couldn’t put it down. I was also a huge fan of the characters too. I will say that I struggled with the intensity of the family’s religious beliefs because at some points in the story, the parents would butt heads with Lib but then again, that also kind of added to the mystery surrounding the little girl.

This is a book I would recommend to people but from some of the other reviews I have looked up, it seems like there are some who liked it and others who didn’t. It has a slow beginning and very strong religious beliefs that some might not like but I do think it helps to round out the novel and really make the truth even more shocking. This book in my library was found under Adult Fiction and I agree with this placement. This has some mature content that I don’t think would appropriate for a Young Adult audience unless they were mature enough to deal with content like that. Overall, I think that this is a solid read and on the whole, I loved the book.

A Great and Terrible Beauty

A Great and Terrible Beauty: Libba Bray

As a kid I had such an imagination. I loved thinking up ideas for playtimes that were out of this world and not at all possible so that is probably a huge reason why I’m in love with the fantasy/supernatural genre. As I’ve said before in my Harry Potter and the Cursed Child post, I love the Harry Potter series and the imagination that’s required from the author to create the story but also from the reader for being able to see what the author sees and believe everything that is written. When I read a book I am so invested in the story that I don’t see the words, it’s just a film that’s playing in my head for me alone. It’s the best feeling to get when reading, I think, but it’s so devastating to realize that you’ve finished the book and now have to either wait for the next book to come out months later, or find a new book and get invested all over again! A Great and Terrible Beauty was a book that I loved as a kid. It’s a historical fantasy YA book (my favourites!!) that feels like a mix of Narnia with a dash of Alice and Wonderland. It’s an amazing book that is about this girl, Gemma Doyle, who starts to have visions just weeks before she goes off to an all girls’ boarding school. From there she has to figure out where she belongs in this cliquey school as well as figure out how to deal with her new abilities like having visions and having the power of travelling to other-world realms. Soon everything gets out of control and Gemma and her friends need to learn how to contain the dangerous magic they’ve been playing with so that it doesn’t cause complete destruction.

It was an amazing book and the other two books in the trilogy were just as fantastic. When I first read this book when I was about 12 years-old and there are a lot of different components to this book that I struggled to keep track of at that age; when I reread this book  a few years later (as I often do with my favourites), I had no trouble following all the rules of this magic that Gemma deals with but just as a little note that anyone who is younger and attempting this book, you may need to take your time because there are some weird rules for this book’s magic. All in all, I would highly recommend this book for anyone. I love fantasy and pairing fantasy with a historical novel makes it a winning combination.