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THE WONDER
By Emma Donoghue
The ostensible “wonder” in Emma Donoghue’s latest novel is Anna O’Donnell, a strange, pious 11-year-old in 1850s Ireland who appears to be subsisting—scratch that, thriving—without food. The actual wonder is that Donoghue has written two novels about a child confined to a room in which a woman tries to protect her (or him) from nefarious forces.
Unlike the mother in her runaway bestseller Room, however, Anna’s might well be a driving part of those forces. The suggestion is certainly there in Donoghue’s cadaverous description of bony-shouldered Rosaleen O’Donnell’s “stone-grey eyes,” her “smile holed with dark.” The protector …read more
Source: Macleans
