It’s as if the lights gradually dim and go out as Anna’s threads begin to unravel. She becomes the child’s saviour, the Ma to her Jack as the air slowly seeps out through the doors and windows - or so that’s how it feels as Anna gets weaker and weaker while the pages turn. While villagers take Anna’s hallucinatory ramblings for gospel, Lib sees innocence twisted into something sacred.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. That same level of emotional and physical suffocation permeates The Wonder, partially due to the limited medical knowledge of its time period, but also due to the control and curiosity of men, as projected on to the little girl at the centre of the spectacle (an issue not only of that time, but ever since). In Room, the pair lives in a claustrophobic physical space, but also a spiritual one that at times makes it a difficult read. The Wonder rides high on the acclaim of Room – which explored the lives of Jack and his mother as they lived in captivity in a shed belonging to the man who raped and kidnapped her as a teenager – and shares in its many themes. She is, in many ways, an equivalent of the five-year-old protagonist of Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room, which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film. She is not so much a figment of black magic as she is a child struggling, trapped in a place where she starves not for sustenance, but for love. In small-town 1850s Ireland, Anna O’Donnell becomes a public attraction, a circus act in the mere wonderment of her continued existence.

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The wonder by emma donoghue