Review by New York Times Review
WHAT'S FICTION MADE of? Do true stories "matter" more than invented ones? These are heady questions for any book to tackle, especially one aimed at young readers. But Brian Selznick's "The Marvels" takes them on and, like the best children's literature, doesn't shy away from complex answers. The book revels in complication, echoes and mirrorings, and peeling back its layers makes for a rich and surprising reading experience. First, let's address the elephant on the shelf. At more than 600 pages, the girth of "The Marvels" might be intimidating, were not more than half those pages illustrations. Readers of Selznick's most recent books, "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" and "Wonderstruck," will recognize the hybrid-novel composition, in which he mixes pages of prose with mostly textless, high-impact pencil drawings. Each black-and-white panel is a wide-format glory that spills across two pages, composed like stills from some lost epic of the silent era. The illustrations of "The Marvels" tell one story, and its prose passages tell another - but where "Wonderstruck" shuffled its narratives, in "The Marvels" they are juxtaposed like two books that happen to share a binding. The illustrated tale comes first. It's the year 1766, and young Billy Marvel is on an American whaling ship. He's performing in a play for the crew when vicious weather sinks the vessel. Rescued and taken to London, Billy falls in with a troupe of stagehands and grows up behind the curtain operating ropes and rigging that echo the workings of his doomed ship. Billy's descendants turn out to be brilliant actors. Generations of Marvels are hailed as geniuses - until Billy's great-great-grandson Leo, a boy with no passion for the theater, breaks the streak. Shunned, he seeks out his hermit grandfather, who regales him with his family's history. Inspired by his ancestor Billy, Leo decides to seek his fortune at sea. After a dramatic twist, the illustrated story abruptly ends. Set over 200 years later, in 1990, the prose story concerns Joseph, another young runaway who could be Leo's twin. He too is escaping an unsatisfying life, fleeing from boarding school in the west of England to find his uncle Albert in London. (Joseph's parents are as distant and cold as Leo's had been, and away on an extended cruise.) Joseph's uncle turns out to be a strange, reclusive grump who dresses in 19th-century finery and lives in a house that seems frozen in time: lighted only by candles, filled with antiques and items that seem to have belonged to the Marvels. There's a model of Billy's ship; a black-and-white photograph of a boy who could be Leo; ghostly sounds. Joseph becomes obsessed with uncovering the story of the Marvels, but Albert won't discuss it. Joseph and a friend follow Albert, discover secret tapes and puzzle over mysterious inscriptions ("You either see it or you don't," a phrase that haunts them). It seems obvious that the Marvels are Joseph's ancestors - but when the story they are discovering comes to an abrupt and unsatisfying end, Joseph demands that Albert tell him the rest. There's a shocking revelation, and Joseph is left feeling betrayed. I won't spoil it; suffice to say, it concerns the sometimes fuzzy line between truth and fiction, and the way stories can ride both sides. "Stories aren't the same as facts!" Joseph shouts. "No," Albert reasons, "but they can both be true." In an afterword that feels like the final act of a magic show, the book hinges open once more to reveal that Uncle Albert and his time-warp house were inspired by a real person and a real house, and a real (invented) family that (fictionally) occupied it. (It's called Dennis Severs' House, and I think it's the most fascinating museum in London.) And so the story is both true and not true, and somehow that makes it matter more than if it had simply been historical fact. Fiction isn't false, but a container of encrypted truths: autobiographical ones, sometimes, and in very good stories, emotional and universal ones too - the sort of truth facts aren't much good at reaching. Fiction is often better at telling the truth than facts, and that's the marvel of it. You either see it or you don't. The story is true and not true, and that makes it matter more than simple historical fact. RANSOM RIGGS is the author of the Peculiar Children trilogy. The third book, "Library of Souls," will be published this month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 6, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Caldecott Medalist Selznick has been creating acclaimed illustrated novels for years now, and his latest takes his groundbreaking narrative format to new heights. Whereas The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007) and Wonderstruck (2011) wove together alternating illustrations and prose, The Marvels opens with a nearly 400-page wordless illustrated story before moving on to words. With his signature close-up, crosshatched pencil drawings and cinematic visual pacing, Selznick opens on a ship at sea, the Kraken, with a young girl tied to the mast and threatened by a vicious monster. Just in the nick of time, an angel appears, ready to save her, but a page turn later, Selznick reveals that the whole scene is a play performed on the ship. Real disaster strikes, however, when a sudden storm tosses the ship, and it sinks into the waves. The girl and the angel really two brothers, Billy and Marcus are the sole survivors, along with Billy's dog, Tar, but Marcus dies on the desert island they've washed up on. Thankfully, Billy is rescued, and after arriving in London, he finds a home among the backstage rigging crew at the Royal Theater. From there, Selznick traces generations of the Marvel family, who all work in the theater in one capacity or another. The final Marvel, Leontes, is a terrible actor and a huge disappointment to his father, so he decides to run away to sea, but just as he's about to depart, he finds the theater engulfed in flames. It's there that the Marvel family saga abruptly ends, and after a few starkly blank pages, the story switches to prose and skips ahead to London in 1990, where Selznick introduces Joseph Jervis, a 13-year-old on the run from his boarding school in England and searching for his estranged uncle, Albert Nightingale. Once he finally finds his uncle's house, he discovers something truly strange: Albert lives in a veritable time capsule. Nineteenth-century furnishings, candlelit chandeliers, ornate paintings of ships, and lush upholstery fill each room. Even stranger, Albert keeps each room in careful disarray, as if a group of people has just left, cleaning and dusting but swapping day-old, half-eaten food and cups of tea with fresh replacements. Curious Joseph can't help but explore, much to the frustration of his grumpy, reserved uncle, and he starts to notice odd things. Pictures of a ship called the Kraken appear all over the house. A picture of a young boy named Leontes with red hair, just like his own is laid out reverentially on a sideboard. Joseph asks his uncle many questions, but Albert's cagey reluctance to answer only solidifies the boy's belief that there's a magnificent (or dreadful) family secret at play. Thanks to the threads of the illustrated tale that are woven throughout the prose story, readers will almost certainly be as convinced as Joseph that there's hidden family history to be discovered. But the reality is both more prosaic and more magical. Just as Selznick's detailed and artfully deliberate illustrations gradually build a moving narrative, so, too, do his carefully wrought words. In unembellished and evocative prose, he slowly shares clues and masterfully misdirects readers' attentions. After Albert reveals the truth, certain slightly odd details from the illustrations, particularly the leitmotifs that link each generation of the Marvels, suddenly take on new significance, and the facts Joseph thinks he has figured out crisply shift into something far more resonant than just a swashbuckling family history. Joseph, who is gently evaluating his sexuality and feeling very different, hopes to find some answers about himself in the secrets Albert is keeping. Meanwhile, lonely, heartbroken Albert, who is facing the troubling reality of being gay in the 1990s, resists attachment of almost every kind. What starts as a quest for a juicy, adventurous legacy sidesteps into an enveloping discovery of home for both Joseph and Albert, neither of whom realized he needed to find one, particularly one as unusual as Albert's. Selznick's warm, affecting family tale is bittersweet, astonishing, and truly marvelous. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Any new Selznick novel, but especially one in the same family as The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck, is a red-letter literary event.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Selznick imagines an alternate backstory for a real English tourist attraction, the Dennis Severs' House: 10 meticulously curated rooms that suggest what life might have been like for a family of Huguenot silk weavers in 18th-century London. The first 500 pages are double-page pencil drawings that (almost) wordlessly tell the story of the Marvel family, beginning with a 1766 shipwreck and following successive generations as they gain fame in London's theater community. As he did in his Caldecott Medal-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Selznick uses a telescoping point of view with great success, bringing the audience effortlessly from the general to the specific, from wide shot to close-up. The next 200 pages are prose, jumping forward to 1990 when a boy named Joseph Jervis has run away from boarding school in search of an uncle he has never met. Uncle Albert, who lives in a home maintained in much the same way as the Dennis Severs' House, has been reclusive ever since losing his "beloved" to AIDS, but Joseph and the neighbor girl he befriends, Frankie, refuse to stay away. Viewed narrowly, it's a love letter to the Dennis Severs' House, but readers won't need preexisting knowledge of the museum to enjoy this powerful story about creating lasting art and finding family in unexpected places. Ages 8-12. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 4-6-This brilliant journey through time in words and pictures is also a story of a theatrical family and their fortunes. This heavy tome opens to tell of one family, the Marvels, from 1766 to 1900 as their connection to the Royal Theatre in London begins and perhaps ends. In the first half of the book, all of this complex history is vividly conveyed through illustrations, with minor hints from playbills, cards, and letters that appear as part of the art. Selznick's ability to convey the passing of time and connections among characters is remarkable. Characters appear, shine, and disappear throughout the years, but certain motifs recur no matter where the spotlight is focused. The second portion of the story is conveyed entirely in text, building on the same themes but taking place in 1990 in a very different London, where the echoes from the past are particularly embodied in 13-year-old Joseph, a boarding school runaway searching for his uncle's house. He soon meets Uncle Albert, who seems less interested in getting to know his nephew than in the preservation of an anachronistic Victorian house which is more museum than home. The echoes from the earlier history are haunting, requiring Joseph to delve into the secrets of Uncle Albert and of the house without giving away his own. Selznick ends with a satisfying section of illustrations that embody the maxim of this family, "You either see it or you don't." VERDICT Complex, entertaining, and full of gorgeous art and writing, this is a powerhouse of a book.-Carol A. Edwards, Denver Public Library, CO © Copyright 2015. 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
Selznick defined his own format with The Invention of Hugo Cabret (rev. 3/07) and Wonderstruck (rev. 9/11), and this book looks the same, on the outside. But Selznick has created something wholly different here, by introducing one entire narrative in images, followed by another in words, one encapsulating the other. Over the first almost-four-hundred pages, his black-and-white drawings tell a story that readers will gather quickly: there is a storm, a shipwreck, and a rescue in a theater; years pass, and a dynasty is born of sons of sons who love the stage and its stories. One child doesnt fit the (theatrical) mold, and in a fateful night and a firestorm, the story abruptly ends. The next one starts, in text, in 1990. Joseph runs away from his boarding school to find the uncle he hardly knows, in London. Uncle Albert lives in a house that feels strangely from another time, where he seems to serve as caretaker for ghosts: no one else lives there, yet Joseph hears voices; Uncle Albert keeps fires burning in the fireplaces and the rooms furniture and belongings undisturbed. Unwelcome even here, Joseph struggles to understand his uncle and uncovers a truth that he didnt expect, about true family, and true stories. While stilted in some written phrasing and dialogue, this book proves once again that Selznick is regardlessa unique and masterful storyteller, and his story-inside-a-story unfolds an emotional narrative with a drama that will leave readers marveling. nina lindsay(c) Copyright 2015. 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
In the final volume of a trilogy connected by theme, structural innovation, and exquisite visual storytelling, Selznick challenges readers to see.Starting in 1766, the first portion unfolds in nearly 400 pages of pictures, rendered in pencil. A ship in shadows, a luminous angel, an abandoned baby in a basketthese are among the phenomena affecting five generations of London actors. Disguises and surprises reveal that what one sees is not always what is true. Fast-forwarding to the 1990s, the author describes in prose a runaway who peers longingly into a candlelit dwelling. Joseph is searching for an uncle and something more elusivefamily. Observant readers will recall this recently viewed address. Inspired by the actual Dennis Severs' House (where scent, sound, setting, and the motto "You either see it or you don't" transport visitors to 18th-century London), Selznick provides a sensory equivalent throughout his eloquent and provocative text. The poetry of Yeats and references to The Winter's Tale add luster. Carefully crafted chapters pose puzzles and connect to the prior visual narrative. In poignant scenes, the teen learns about his uncle's beloved, lost to AIDS but present through the truths of the home's staged stories. A powerful visual epilogue weaves threads from both sections, and the final spread presents a heartening awakening to sight.Time, grief, forgiveness, and love intersect in epic theater celebrating mysteries of the heart and spirit. (notes) (Fiction. 10 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
