I Have a Kidlit Blog!

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.