Review by New York Times 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, "Wonders truck" - 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 blackand-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? Adam Gopnik is the author of "The Steps Across the Water," a novel for children. His new book, "The Table Comes First," will be published in October.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 11, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Opening Selznick's new book is like opening a cabinet of wonders the early museum display case filled with a nearly infinite variety of amazing things that is so central to this story. Following the Caldecott Medal-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007), Selznick offers another visual narrative, one that feels even better suited to his inventive style. The beautifully crafted structure includes two stories set 50 years apart. The first, set in 1977, is told in text and follows Ben, who is grieving the sudden loss of his mother when he stumbles upon clues that point to his father's identity. The second, told entirely in richly shaded pencil drawings, opens in 1927 as a young girl, Rose, gazes at a newspaper clipping. Rose is deaf, and Ben also loses his hearing, during a lightning strike. Both lonely children run away to New York City, and their parallel stories echo and reflect each other through nuanced details, which lead like a treasure map to a conjoined, deeply satisfying conclusion. Selznick plays with a plethora of interwoven themes, including deafness and silence, the ability to see and value the world, family, and the interconnectedness of life. Although the book is hefty, at more than 600 pages, the pace is nevertheless brisk, and the kid-appealing mystery propels the story. With appreciative nods to museums, libraries, and E. L. Konigsburg, Wonderstruck is a gift for the eye, mind, and heart.--Rutan, Lynn Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Selznick follows his Caldecott-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret with another illustrated novel that should cement his reputation as one of the most innovative storytellers at work today. Ben and Rose are both hearing-impaired. He is 12 in 1977; she is the same age 50 years earlier. Selznick tells their story in prose and pictures beginning with Ben, living (unhappily) with his aunt and uncle, 83 steps from the Minnesota lake cabin he shared with his librarian mother until her death in a car accident three months earlier. He has never met his father, but has reason to believe he may live in New York. As in Hugo Cabret, a significant part of the story is told in sequential illustrations, most of which depict the even unhappier Rose, whose movie star mother has remarried, leaving her daughter with her ex-husband in New Jersey. Both children run away to Manhattan seeking something from their respective absent parents. It takes several hundred pages and a big chunk of exposition to connect these two strands, but they converge in an emotionally satisfying way. Selznick masterfully uses pencil and paper like a camera, starting a sequence with a wide shot and zooming in on details on successive pages. Key scenes occur when the runaways find themselves in one of Manhattan's storied museums, and with one character named Jamie, and Rose's surname being Kincaid, it's impossible not to think of E.L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, to which Selznick tips his hat in an author's note. Like that Newbery winner, Selznick's story has the makings of a kid-pleasing classic. Ages 9-up. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 4-8-Young Rose and Ben, both deaf, find themselves at the American Museum of Natural History on similar quests though 50 years apart. Their parallel stories, one told in prose and the other in pictures, eventually intersect, but until they do readers are left hoping that Ben will find a family to love and Rose a place where she belongs. A warm, magical tale done in Selznick's signature style. (Aug.) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
With Wonderstruck's opening wordless sequence of an approaching wolf, readers might think they've embarked upon a Gary Paulsen novel, but this is a story not of wilderness adventure but of two young people running -- to New York City -- for their lives. The pictures (pencil, double-page spread, wordless) follow a young girl, Rose, living in material comfort but also emotional distress in 1927 Hoboken; the text is set in 1977 in Minnesota's Boundary Waters region, where a boy, Ben, struggles with the death of his mother and the loss of his hearing. Yes, Rose and Ben eventually meet, as do the text and pictures, but both stories are encumbered by the conclusion of the book, which, in resolving many themes and mysteries, dictates too much of what has gone before -- it feels as if the narrative was composed backward rather than arising organically from its beginnings. For example, Rose's childhood hobby of constructing model buildings from the pages of hated books doesn't seem to follow from anything, but it does give her an adult career at New York's Museum of Natural History, where Ben also finds himself after several similarly belabored circumstances. Still, there is much technical brilliance here, both in the segues between text and pictures and between the pictures themselves, as in a scene where Rose, locked in a room, seems to be contemplating the many photographs on a wall, but a page turn reveals that Rose has actually spotted a window -- and escapes. While Ben's story suffers from an excess of telling rather than showing, he (Rose, too) is openhearted and easy to love. The intricate puzzle-solving of the plot gets a generous and welcome shot of straightforward emotion when Ben is given an unabashedly romantic friendship with another boy, Jamie, with whom he experiences the wonders of the museum in secret and at night, a nod to E. L. Konigsburg that Selznick acknowledges in an informative closing note. roger sutton (c) Copyright 2011. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Brian Selznick didn't have to do it.He didn't have to return to the groundbreaking pictures-and-text format that stunned the children's-book world in 2007 and won him an unlikelythough entirely deservedCaldecott medal for The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Weighing in at about two pounds, the 500-plus page tome combined textual and visual storytelling in a way no one had quite seen before.In a world where the new becomes old in the blink of an eye, Selznick could have honorably rested on his laurels and returned to the standard 32-to-48page picture-book format he has already mastered. He didn't have to try to top himself.But he has.If Hugo Cabret was a risky experiment that succeeded beyond Selznick and publisher Scholastic's wildest dreams (well, maybe not Scholastic'sthey dream big), his follow-up, Wonderstruck, is a far riskier enterprise. In replicating the storytelling format of Hugo, Selznick begs comparisons that could easily find Wonderstruck wanting or just seem stale.Like its predecessor, this self-described "novel in words and pictures" opens with a cinematic, multi-page, wordless black-and-white sequence: Two wolves lope through a wooded landscape, the illustrator's "camera" zooming in to the eye of one till readers are lost in its pupil. The scene changes abruptly, to Gunflint Lake, Minn., in 1977. Prose describes how Ben Wilson, age 12, wakes from a nightmare about wolves. He's three months an orphan, living with his aunt and cousins after his mother's death in an automobile accident; he never knew his father. Then the scene cuts again, to Hoboken in 1927. A sequence of Selznick's now-trademark densely crosshatched black-and-white drawings introduces readers to a girl, clearly lonely, who lives in an attic room that looks out at New York City and that is filled with movie-star memorabilia and modelsscads of themof the skyscrapers of New York.Readers know that the two stories will converge, but Selznick keeps them guessing, cutting back and forth with expert precision. Both children leave their unhappy homes and head to New York City, Ben hoping to find his father and the girl also in search of family. The girl, readers learn, is deaf; her silent world is brilliantly evoked in wordless sequences, while Ben's story unfolds in prose. Both stories are equally immersive and impeccably paced.The two threads come together at the American Museum of Natural History, Selznick's words and pictures communicating total exhilaration (and conscious homage to The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler). Hugo brought the bygone excitement of silent movies to children; Wonderstruck shows them the thrilling possibilities of museums in a way Night at the Museum doesn't even bother to.Visually stunning, completely compelling, Wonderstruck demonstrates a mastery and maturity that proves that, yes, lightning can strike twice. (Historical fiction. 9 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
