I want this blog to be a place to think and write about children's literature as I press on with my own young adult novel. I'm generally at least a year behind teachers and librarians, so it's not surprising that my first post is about a book I'm sure most kidlit folks have already read. Please comment!
Wonder by R.J.
Palacio
This book, an incredibly hyped first middle-grade novel that
reached #1 on the New York Times
bestseller list and then began to show up on required reading lists around the
country, scared me into avoiding it. I told myself it was because reading
middle grade would complicate the young adult voice I’m working on, but really
my fear came from the potential within the story. I was so afraid Wonder would be hokey—or, worse, would
lapse into what the disability community calls inspiration porn: the tired old narrative of a person (usually an
adult, but sometimes a child) existing chiefly to make others feel better about
themselves. I hate that. We can all do that for each other, every day. It doesn't have to be reserved as consolation for being born disabled. As characters, we’re often underdeveloped, titillatingly abnormal,
a conduit for Very Important Lessons About Life. Young readers can learn the
lessons too safely in these kinds of books, without much risk; they can sigh
with relief that they aren’t that child when they reach the end.
And then I read it—for a third of it, I held my breath a little.
August Pullman, the beautifully written boy, is ten. He has
“a craniofacial anomaly” due to a genetic mutation, and it’s particularly
severe (“a double dose,” says his sister Olivia) because both his parents are
carriers of this gene. Although he’s had a cleft palate repair, that’s the most
minor part of the whole picture of his face. In one of her sections of the
impressively strong alternating points of view that make up his story, Olivia
explains: “His eyes are about an inch below where they should be on his face,
almost to halfway down his cheeks.” He doesn’t have outer ears, eyebrows, or
eyelashes.
Take that boy and put him in a private prep school—his first
school experience outside of home. Of course, Auggie’s conflicted, in the
beginning, about attending, and of course, students (some who’ve been urged to
befriend him) are shocked. But I love the depths to which I felt his reaction
to their reactions.
His first day is awful, so bad that he stops reading The Hobbit at bedtime and bursts into
tears. He lets his mother in to the sadness and it breaks my heart:
“Why do I have to be so ugly,
Mommy?” I whispered.
“No, baby, you’re not…”
“I know I am.”
She kissed me all over my face. She
kissed my eyes that came down too far. She kissed my cheeks that looked punched
in. She kissed my tortoise mouth.
She said words that I know were
meant to help me, but words can’t change my face.
Even the normal (as in, fifth grade) kid stuff, like the
fierce love his mother, father, and Olivia have for Auggie, is captivating and
throat-tightening. The thing about Wonder,
though, is that it’s a terrifically big
book—not just in terms of pages but of ideas, too. It challenges young readers to think about the
consequences of exclusion and other meanness, the power of kindness, and even
the unfairness of the world. Of biology. Olivia thinks about Punnett squares
and the odds of having her own August when she’s an adult: “There are countless
people under words like ‘germline mosaicism,’ ‘chromosome rearrangement,’ and
‘delayed mutation.’ Countless babies who’ll never be born, like mine."
This post will never end if I dive into the ridiculously
moving and thought-provoking fifth grade graduation speeches August’s teachers
and the school director give, so I won’t. But about the problematic resolution,
which I will address as unspecifically as I can to protect anyone lucky enough
to be able to read the book for the first time…
As an adult, I can’t escape its inspiration porn feel. If it were filmed (I’d be very surprised;
parents would protest and Auggie’s appearance would figure in the ratings
warning at the bottom of previews), I wouldn’t buy it at all—I need to be in
Auggie’s head for it to work. In the book, Auggie receives something he thinks
everyone should receive. He doesn’t see it the way I do, and having had a
deranged “motivational speaker” point me out in a gym full of my peers and
command them to thank God they weren’t like me, I can attest that there’s a
line between inspiration porn and schadenfreude and that I’d rather be on
August’s side of it. If you still need convincing that nondisabled people often
see children with disabilities this way, there’s the graduation section of Lucy
Grealy’s essay “Masks,” from her memoir Autobiography
of a Face.
A quibble: All the voices—August, Olivia, August’s friend
Jack, Olivia’s friend Miranda, who once gave Auggie an astronaut helmet he wore
for 2 years straight, and Olivia’s boyfriend Justin—are nearly perfect.
Sometimes the characters say things like, “….though I wouldn’t do X…” and I
don’t think they’d say things like that, any of them. Not even Olivia, who is
fifteen and reads Tolstoy. But the tiny breaks in the spell are absorbed by complexity,
humor, and heart. And I also love that Auggie’s
parents are present and lovable, and that there are so many epigraphs, showing
young readers that texts can impact other texts and our real lives at the same time. This one sure did.
