Year of Wonders: Geraldine Brooks

This was a novel about the Plague in England in the 1600's. A woman walks to the Rectors home and reminisces about being happy once. The story then starts when she was 15 and meets back up to the "current" time the story begin in. When she was 15 she was married to an older man. By the time she was 18 she was a widow due to her husband dying in a mining accident. By the time she was 20 she had lost both of her sons when a boarder carrying the plague from London stayed in her home. She watched a friend hanged as a witch and her town diminish as the plague swept through. By the time the Plague was over, she had lost all of her family. Her father took advantage of his neighbors by overcharging them for digging graves and was finally punished when he tried killing a man and buried him alive while ransacking his home. Her Stepmother took advantage of the women by claiming she was a witch and selling ridiculous advice on how to keep the plague away. The Stepmother ended up going crazy after all her children died and ended up killing the protagonist's best friend. By the end of the novel the woman gained a new little girl, who was going to be killed because she was born out of sin and gave birth to another little girl after having sex with the minister. She left England by boat and then remarried a Muslim man and became part of his harem. This was a very interesting book about 16th Century England during sickness and was based on an actual town who barricaded themselves from the outside world to keep from infecting them. By the time the plague was over 2/3 of the town had died.