Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick

Before I sat down to write about Wonderstruck I went back and looked at my last post about Between Shades of Grey and I noticed that maybe 10% of that blog post was about the book, and the rest was me expounding on Russia.  The point of this blog, of course, is for me to talk about young adult literature.  So from this point forward I will try to do that for at least 15% of the time.  That is unless I have something that is simply so pithy and witty to say that it would be a disservice to you, the reader, if I kept it to myself.  Or if it helps me to illuminate my opinion of the book.  Or if my thoughts on the book are not substantial enough to carry the weight of the whole blog post.  Or if I didn't like the book and I want to hide behind some amusing anecdotes.  Or if I just feel like writing about myself.  Or for other reasons that may occur to me later.

But I digress.  Wonderstruck is a book about a boy, Ben, growing up in Minnesota and a girl, Rose, growing up in New Jersey fifty years apart.  Ben's story is written in prose; Rose's story is told in illustrations.  At the beginning of the book, it's not clear what the relationship between these two characters is.  Each has a separate, and independently compelling, plot.  As the book progresses though, similarities begin to grow.  Rose is deaf, Ben has hearing in one ear but loses it completely in a freak accident.  Both characters run away from home at a young age.  Over the course of the book, which is long but reads really quickly thanks to fully half of it being illustrations, the relationship between Ben and Rose is slowly defined.

That's about all I can say about the plot of the book without spoiling it.  Wonderstruck is a book that gives up its surprises slowly; its pace is one of its great strengths.  It's not what you'd call high drama - there are no cliffhangers and there is no defying of death - but the questions that the book asks at its beginning and the extremely measured way in which they are answered makes for an extremely compelling read.  After the loss of his mother, Ben uncovers some tantalizing clues about the identity of his father, whom he has never known.  He spends the rest of the book trying to track him down, and also experiencing the world as a deaf person.

I think there's something for pretty much any kid to find interesting in Wonderstruck.  It incorporates some pretty foundational aspects of being a teenager:  the urge to understand yourself, the urge to run away to do so, and the sense that there are few, if any, people in the world who truly get you.  Basically, Wonderstruck is about finding your place in the world, a world that seems in many ways seems cruel and unsympathetic.  Ben and Rose are also extremely proactive in trying to improve their situations and solve their problems, and they never whine or succumb to melodrama, which are traits I like in a fictional character (ahem, Harry Potter).

I also very much enjoyed the splitting of the book into two narratives.  Sometimes this classic device can be used to the detriment of the flow of the story, but in this case I think it was used extremely well.  It created that need to turn pages in what might have otherwise been a plot without a truly driving force.

There are a few ways that you could go with readalongs for Wonderstruck.  If you'd like to delve further into Deaf culture and the idea of growing up deaf in a hearing world, you could check out What's That Pig Outdoors by Henry Kisor, which is Kisor's memoir.  Kisor is a well-known book reviewer and literary critic.  You could also go with Oliver Sacks's Seeing Voices.  Sacks writes my personal favorite brand of non-ficiton:  compelling narratives blended with frequent pauses for diversion into various subjects that inform one's understanding of the topic.  It's like being in the room with an extremely smart, but also funny and down-to-earth person who is willing to share their wealth of knowledge with you.

Large parts of Wonderstruck take place inside the Museum of Natural History in New York, and a big way that the characters in Wonderstruck relate to each other has to do with museum exhibits.  If you wanted to know more about how museums work, you could check out Making the Mummies Dance, by Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the archetypal art world man-about-town.  If you want to get further inside the way that humans interact with art in general, you could check out New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman's The Accidental Masterpiece, which is an excellent collection of essays about the intersection of art and life.  Or, if you just want to meet the characters where they are, you could find a copy of Windows on Nature by Stephen Quinn, which is a book of photos of the nature exhibits in the Museum of Natural History, which are discussed at length in Wonderstruck.  Quinn is a diorama artist at the museum, which is a connection whose relevance will become plain to you if you read Wonderstruck.

So in summation, I recommend Wonderstruck without reservation.  I think I did a pretty good job of staying on task during this blog post.  I did not, for example, tell about how my dad used to take me to the natural history museum in Lawrence all the time as a kid before we moved to Indiana, and how I loved to watch the bees come in and out through that giant fake tree.  But I resisted!  Well ok, I snuck in one sentence.  But hey, you're welcome to start a blog of your own if you think you can do better.