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What it argues
Auggie Pullman is ten years old and about to start fifth grade at a private school in New York City. He has a facial difference — the result of a rare genetic syndrome — and has been homeschooled his entire life. Wonder follows his first year at Beecher Prep: the cruelties and the kindnesses, the complicated politics of middle school friendships, and the gradual way the community shifts around him.
The novel is structured in multiple voices — Auggie, his sister Via, his friends Jack and Summer, and others — which allows Palacio to show how the same events look different from different vantage points. Each narrator reveals something the others miss or misread, and the cumulative portrait is of an ordinary school community changed by contact with someone who can't hide his difference. The central argument is that kindness is a choice, not a disposition, and that choosing it in the face of social pressure is harder than it sounds.
What it gets right
- 1.
Kindness is not instinctive in the face of social pressure; it requires a specific choice, and the novel takes that choice seriously rather than treating it as easy.
- 2.
The multiple-narrator structure makes the novel more honest about how differently the same events register — Via's experience of being Auggie's sister is as fully drawn as Auggie's own.
- 3.
Facial difference as a subject forces questions the novel doesn't fully answer: what are we actually looking at when we stare, and what does our discomfort reveal about us?
What it covers
Who wrote it
R.J. Palacio is the pen name of Raquel Jaramillo, an American author and former art director who spent twenty years designing book covers before writing Wonder as her debut novel. Published in 2012, Wonder became a phenomenon — it spent more than two hundred consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold over fourteen million copies worldwide. She followed it with 365 Days of Wonder, Auggie and Me (companion stories), and White Bird, a graphic novel set during the Holocaust. A major film adaptation starring Jacob Tremblay as Auggie was released in 2017.
