Member Reviews

This is such a cool idea for a book! I'm a bit oversaturated with COVID-19 stories but this is a unique way to illustrate the headlines of 2020. It's amazing to look back and recount all of the major cultural experiences that occurred in one year. Now that I have some separation from the events, it's so interesting to see another perspective.

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I'm going to assume anyone reading this review has read the publisher's description of this book, which explains how Engler came to create this book. If not, go read it; I'll wait.
This is an interesting book, at once discomfiting and hard to put down. It's still so fresh, and being reminded of it is a little painful - I'm not sure I have enough distance from it yet. At the same time, it's cathartic reading this, and helped me get a better perspective of how and when things took place, because time stopped working correctly in 2020, amiright? Seeing it play out in one long stream of days rather than one day at a time, it's kinda crazy. Nothing is covered deeply here, because of the constraints of the illustration size, but what's said is a reminder to all of us who read this book - we made it. We went through so much, and while we're still feeling the repercussions of 2020 (did that year actually end, or are we still there, just calling it by a different name?), somehow, we made it. Living through historic times is so weird.

#ADiaryofthePlagueYear #NetGalley

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Very original and moving book. I liked both the approach - to show history-in-the-making through headlines - and the rough aesthetics. It was sometimes a little too painful, as we are still waiting for the pandemic to go away two years later, but this book is definitely worth buying for the future, as a one of a kind memento of this very strange time.

Thanks to the publisher, Henry Holt & Company, Metropolitan Books, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

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A Diary of a the Plague Year is a day by day chronicle of the year 2020. Each page is a day of 2020 where the author illustrated and composed a tiny handwritten blurb of the headlines for that day. The illustrations were great and the concept was very clever, but this book really stressed me out. I think it is just too soon to go through the chaos and awfulness of 2020 - fires, elections, Covid, protests. Too much right now. This book will be perfect in about a decade. Thank you to NetGalley for the chance to read and review this book!

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Interesting to look back visually at the daily headlines of 2020, banner year that it was (/sarcasm), but ultimately I think we're still too close in the rearview for this to have much impact. Revisit in a decade and this will be much more powerful.

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This book won’t be for everyone as it is one person’s opinions of a depressing year for many. However historically it covers a lot that happened around the world and mostly in NYC and will be invaluable to future historians. I enjoyed the format.

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I really enjoyed this collection of art. It was very hard to download the PDF and was formatted weirdly, but I know that's not how the final book would be. I really enjoyed reflecting everything that happened in 2020 and thought the artwork was beautiful.

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I thought this was awesome, though I realize a book about 2020 may not be for everyone. Engler sat down every morning and made a small painting about the day's headlines for five years as part of a bigger project, but a publisher saw her work online and suggested she turn 2020 (or rather 2020 plus 20 days, to end with the inauguration) into a book. I like her painting style a lot, but it was also fascinating to see the year presented in one visual block like this—the element of interpretation, but also the confirmation that yes, that year was just as horrible as I remember. I found myself glued to it, turning the pages to see what happened next, even though I KNEW what happened next. The presentation was everything, and it was moving in ways that a straight-up collection of headlines wouldn't have been.

Bloom interview forthcoming.

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I liked the idea of this book more than the book itself. I read through it carefully and found it to be extremely depressing. How could you not be depressed reading this? I initially liked the drawings but after awhile I was bored with them since they are all in the same style. They are very good drawings... but I didn't need to see this many of them.

Yet, it is an accounting of a year and perhaps future generations will find it more palatable.

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This book, in which the author has drawn the news headlines for every day in 2020 (and a little in 2021), left me overwhelmed and impressed.

Impressed because of the endurance to do this and for her compositions (these aren't great portraits, but I like how she blended the news of the day in her drawings).

Overwhelmed because the last 16 months have been unendingly intense, stressful, historic, and generally awful and it honestly felt bad to see the news again for very day. The slow ramp up of coronavirus into an explosion in February and March; the George Floyd protests in the summer; and then the election, the fraud accusations, and the January 6th insurrection attempt. And while she ends it with Biden's inauguration (maybe as an attempt to a return to "normal" ending), the intensity and general suckitude of that year were enough to make me feel bad looking at her art for each day.

Twenty years from now this may be a great record of a historical year that helped defined the first half of the 21st century, but right now it just hurt.

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2020 is a blur to me and I wish I had kept a diary to remember everything going on -- at most, some days I did write down thoughts in a gratitude journal to get me through the worst of days. I was so pleased to come across this book -- not only does it provide a daily diary of key headlines and happenings for every day in 2020, I was it is accompanied by drawings/paintings for each day. I like too that the text in each image is also repeated below so that I can visually take in the whole image and then read the description. Not only does this book encapsulate a "lost year" for me, I was stunned about all that happened in 2020 besides the Covid-19 pandemic! I am glad to have this book and it also has made me take more notice of all the happenings going on in our world every day.

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Elise Engler is an artist who has painted a portrait based on daily headlines for years. She starts on Jan 20, 2020 and goes through Jan 21, 2021. 2020 was a year we'd rather forget, but it is going to be a remembered as a historic year. I think this collection of portraits is a brilliant & unique way to document what we all lived. My favorite portrait was the last- the inauguration.

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Sobering. That was 2020. The longer we live, the more we remember sobering years. 1963 and 1968: assassinations. 1978: Jim Jones’ koolaid 1986: the Challenger. We were sobered by these events but they did not affect us as personally as 2020 did.

The author-artist devotes a page a day to the daily headlines, COVID. Lockdowns. A scowling out-going president.

This book is rough to look at with memories so recent and some events still raging today. Future generations might enjoy it. I, however, won’t suggest the twelve-year-old or even the 34-year-old in my life read it now.

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A big thank-you to NetGalley, the author, and publisher for giving me a copy of this book for an unbiased review.

1/5 - Not for me.

I had to sit with this rating for a while before committing to it. This book is important and informative, but I rate books based on my experience with them. This does not necessarily mean enjoyment - I might rate a book highly because I disagree with it but it opened new ways of thinking for me, for instance. I even seek out books that make me worry or break my heart - I don't mind a tear-jerker.

But this book gave me the experience of reliving the absolute nightmare that was 2020 all over again and I just cannot recommend that to anyone who is as traumatized by that year as I am. The worst part is - that nightmare is far from over. COVID is still with us; we are still losing our loved ones and dealing with the pain and isolation of this pandemic. I had a visceral reaction to this book where I could not get through it quickly enough because each page brought up painful memories on a personal and national scale. It left me feeling nauseated and depleted.

Maybe this is my fault - what did I expect from a book titled "A Diary of the Plague Year"? But I suppose maybe I figured the account would be more personal, which would allow me to connect with the illustrator and not fixate so much on the traumas I myself still carry. Or maybe I thought the account would highlight some of the positives that I had forgotten. Instead, it read exactly in the way that I remember this year - a steady march of daily rising death counts, impediments to justice, global climate change disasters - a sort of rhythm of misery that I am not ready to re-encounter.

My rating of this book does not reflect its value. I can see this being used to study the history of 2020 several decades from now. It is accurate and precise, offering a tapestry that covers what living 2020 was like. But my personal experience in reading this book was just too similar to my experience of living out that year. And for this reason, it was not for me.

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A Diary of the Plague Year is an engaging and haunting visual account of the first year of the Covid pandemic. Elise Engler compiles daily paintings portraying each day's top headlines. Seeing it all together, and realizing that this all happened so quickly in the span of one year, is a bit of a shock - I found myself thinking at certain points that some of the events had happened several years ago! So seeing the chronology and rapid succession of events really drilled in what a horror show we've been living. Some of it feels like it should be satire, except it's not - we really went through these things. Some of the paintings started to feel a little repetitive - but that's also how the pandemic felt for a lot of us, so that actually adds to the honest depiction of the situation. I liked that it included headlines about other things that were happening in the world at the same time as the pandemic, showing the many layers of what made it such a hellish year. Overall this is a brilliant visual account of the year that felt like a decade. I think this could easily be used as a teaching tool in history classes in the future. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an e-arc of A Diary of the Plague Year.

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Artist Elisa Engler brings us an inspired time capsule of an awful year. Using daily headlines for inspiration, Engler created an image a day for 2020. Cataloged here they come together to form an encyclopedic view of a wild period of time in both American and world history.

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Beautifully drawn an amazing diary of 2020 a year that none of us who lived through it will forget. Our day to day nightmare & of course-moments of laughter moments of sadness.I will be recommending and gifting this book a meaningful souvenir of what we lived through.#netgalley#henryholt

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Perhaps it is that I am not interested in NYC, or perhaps not such a strong Democrat as the artist clearly is, but I struggled a bit with this one and ended up skimming. Expected more images than words. To each their own, but must be in the minority, as other reviews clearly loved it.

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I love the premise of this book, and the author did a great job of capturing how everything felt during that last 13ish months of Trump's presidency. It is really hard to believe that ALL of that happened in 13 months. What a crazy time. It was great to 're-live' what happened and reflect on how different things are now.

Thanks to NetGalley and Henry Holt & Company for providing me with the opportunity to read and review this book.

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This book compiles Elise Engler's illustrated, collage-style diary entries from Jan 20, 2020 (the first day COVID entered her diary) to Jan 21, 2021 (Biden's inauguration) in this book. As Engler combed through each day's headlines, she illustrated several, recording that day's happenings. What results is a poignant collective remembering of the Plague Year through Engler's eyes.

Page by page, I was blown away by Engler's attention to detail, her vision of these events - both local and global, as the world ground to a halt during the pandemic. While I experienced so many of the happenings of the past year as individual moments, this book puts forward these moments as a longer string of events, as what we knew shifted by the day. What comes together highlights not only the pandemic, but also US political tumult, racial unrest, and global events of import. Engler's focus on single events (e.g. the death of RBG) resulted in the most impactful pages of this book.

I was really worried that I wouldn't be ready for a book like this, and while it had it's challenging emotional moments, it also proved cathartic. As a historian, I like seeing how pieces come together, forming a narrative and patterns of behavior over time, and this book provided me space to start seeing those connections. Engler's voice and vision radiate throughout this book, as we see the pandemic through her eyes. Most shocking was the process of continually remembering -- "oh that happened this year?"...I had forgotten so much already.

Engler's NYC location perhaps skews her chosen topics toward some NYC minutia, highlighting things that sometimes don't make sense to an outsider, but that also I think shaped her perspective and isn't a deal-breaker in any way.

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