Book Summary
Ben, a deaf child, has recently lost his mother in an accident. He discovers clues to his past among his mother's belongings and runs away from home in search of his father (whom he's never met). Rose, also a deaf child, is lonely and unhappy at home so she runs away to see her mother who is a famous actress. Their two stories take place 50 years apart but unfold and connect through a series of coincidental events.
APA Reference
Selznick, B. (2011).
Wonderstruck. New York, NY: Scholastic Press.
Impressions
This was a quick and easy read despite its size (most of the pages are illustrations). It's definitely an intriguing story to begin with. There are two separate stories unfolding -one through words and the other through pictures- and it's definitely engaging for the reader to try to figure out how they are connected. Although, about half way through I started to figure it out and it then became very predictable. I think many children would enjoy the book, it's presented in a unique way, the main characters are deaf (which may be interesting and different for some to read about), and it deals with running away (something many children think about at some point). Adults, as I previously stated, may find it predictable. The events seem to unfold a little too coincidentally, but it's still an enjoyable read. The illustrations are captivating and mysterious.
Professional Review
Sequels and seconds-in-a-series are as often as not better than the starter volume, and yet it seems incumbent upon us all to doubt them anyway. “Through the Looking Glass” is an incomparably better book than its predecessor — its chess-problem structure more ingenious; its nonsense poems far more inspired — but we still say “Alice in Wonderland” and always shall when we refer to Carroll’s world. Freshness of vision is in all departments of life an aesthetic category not to be sneezed at.
All of which is a necessarily elaborate way of saying that Brian Selznick’s new book, “Wonderstruck” — engrossing, intelligent, beautifully engineered and expertly told both in word and image — cannot entirely escape the force field or expectations set up by his 2008 Caldecott winner, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret.” “Hugo Cabret” was one of those rare books — Chris Van Allsburg’s tale “The Polar Express” is the last that comes to mind — that strike imaginations small and large with a force, like, well, thunder. Neither graphic novel nor illustrated book, its composite of storytelling forms seemed derived from the storyboards of some lost Czech genius of the silent film era rather than anything evident in other books. (Martin Scorsese has adapted it into a film to be released this fall.)
Though not a sequel of matter, “Wonderstruck” is very much a sequel of method, and a test of it. Can Selznick’s black-and-white chiaroscuro spell-making be transported or extended beyond the European fin de siècle setting that seemed essential in its first appearance?
The material for this new book is, it seems, very deliberately wrenched at once into an entirely new and more American landscape. Ben, an adolescent boy growing up in “Gunflint Lake,” Minn., in the 1970s has lost his loving mother in a car accident — his true father is unknown to him — and a second disaster (telephone, lightning) soon costs him his ability to hear. An obscure series of clues suggests that his father may live in New York, and Ben sets out in search of him. In the midst of the subdued narration of this sad story we are suddenly — with masterly abruptness, and a complete absence of explanation — thrown into a second tale, told entirely in black and white panels and far more melodramatically conveyed, of an unnamed deaf girl who in the 1920s runs away from her Hoboken home in search of a Broadway star. In a New York made more hallucinatory by its silence, she discovers the actress, and we are given a startling revelation about her identity. Then the two stories, Ben’s flight to the city and the as-yet-unnamed girl’s flight to safety 50 years earlier, slowly entangle and become one, and the mysteries of the two flights (his toward his father, hers toward him) resolve beautifully on the night of the New York City blackout in 1977 (which exists here, rather against the grain of history, as a peaceful, not to say pastoral, occasion). Throughout, Selznick’s eye for the details of New York’s enchanted places — the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History, Times Square in the 1920s and the too easily forgotten marvel of the City Panorama at the Queens Museum of Art — are pitch, or rather picture, perfect.
There is so much to like and admire that the reader reluctantly confesses to what our children’s teachers call, delicately, “some problems” with the story. The hero, Ben, seems rather routinely imagined: one of those isolated Fine Boys with a Disability who are the default heroes of too many children’s books. The heroes and heroines of imaginative literature need not be tragically flawed, but they ought to be tarter, more capable of imperfection, than this. Even Ben’s deafness seems oddly un-disabling. He manages the flight to New York, and then secrets himself into the Museum of Natural History with suspiciously little difficulty. The practicalities of his circumstances in New York are hard to imagine credibly, even on the somewhat dreamlike terms in which they are offered. That a deaf boy would run all the way to New York is the necessary premise — but surely his sleeping and sanitary arrangements could be explained with more clarity than Selznick provides. Selznick’s style is so silent that it seems logical that it take in the mute world. But the concern with the deaf “issues” that fill the book, though in one way “appropriate” as those same teachers would say, feels at times too appropriate — uncomfortably pious, a medicinal outgrowth of the fable rather than essential to its magic.
Yet whenever such doubts arise they are overcome, overwhelmed even, by the purity of Selznick’s imagination. The moment, for instance, when the heroine is rescued by an at first enigmatic museum worker named Walter — yields an almost unbearable tenderness.
In a long, gracious afterword, Selznick cites “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” among his sources and models, and promises references to that earlier classic about children fleeing to a New York museum buried throughout his book. (We’re looking.) Though a lovely tribute, the juxtaposition of this book and that one is arresting, and instructive. Where that ’60s classic, like so many of its kind and time, was lightly satirical and assumed an easy passage between the material of children’s literature and that of grown-up affairs, books of equivalent ambition and point a half-century later are more purposefully enigmatic and drawn above all to sites of silent mystery like the Natural History museum, not only as it appears at night (as in the movies), but as it was in the past. Konigsburg’s children, hiding in the Met, were practical people with practical problems, and the mystery that entices them is resolved, even debunked a little, at the end. They were being educated in the realities of life.
For Selznick, as for Van Allsburg, or for that matter, Kate DiCamillo, the beauty of strangeness, more than its management, is the purpose of storytelling, and though some of their questions are answered, their mysteries remain intact. Selznick’s gift is for the uncanny and the haunting, and his subject is not only the strange poetry of ordinary things but the poetry of things from another time: train stations, frozen museum dioramas and old bookstores. Small bells ring at midnight, and mute protagonists embrace in darkness.
So, while the ostensible moral of “Wonderstruck” is the entanglement of people, its real lesson is about memory. Beyond its honorable message about the dignity of deafness, it teaches a respect for the past and for the power of memory to make minds. In an age when mass entertainment inclines children toward movement and energy, and screens accustom their eyes to the sparkle of pixilated light, one of the tasks books have taken on is to teach them, and us, to value stillness. Mere nostalgia, maybe? Well, what is nostalgia, save the vernacular of memory, and so the place where reading starts?
Library Uses
This book incorporates several ways of telling a story without the use of words; through illustration, sign language, and silent film. This would be fun to incorporate into a larger unit on storytelling. Students could work as groups to tell a story without using words/sound; they could act it out, tell a story through pictures or sign language, or even create a silent film.
Book cover image from:
http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/reviews-wonderstruck.
