Wonderstruck

Author: Brian Celznick
Genre: School-Aged, Contemporary Fiction, Deafness
Type: Hardcover
Pages: 640
Publisher: Scholastic Press
First Published: 2011
First Line: "Something hit Ben Wilson and he opened his eyes."

Book Descriptions from GoodReads: Ben and Rose secretly wish for better lives. Ben longs for the father he has never known. Rose dreams of a mysterious actress whose life she chronicles in a scrapbook. When Ben discovers a puzzling clue in his mother's room and Rose reads an enticing headline in the newspaper, both children set out alone on desperate quests to find what they are missing.

Set fifty years apart, these two independent stories - Ben's told in words, Rose's in pictures - weave back and worth in symmetry.

My Rating: 3.5 stars

My Review:  Using printed words for Ben's story and beautiful illustrations for Rose's, Selznick provides his readers with two distinct stories involving Deaf children in two different eras. 

As a former Sign Language Interpreter, I'm always drawn to books involving Deaf characters and after seeing Millie Simmonds in The Quiet Place and knowing she was in the movie version of Wonderstruck, I knew I wanted to read this book before seeing the highly acclaimed movie.

For a 640 page book, this book is a fast read and shouldn't intimidate readers. The story smoothly jumps back and forth between Ben and Rose's POVs which are 50 years part. They each are missing someone special and yearn to find them. I was impressed with how smoothly these two points of view, with very different methods of telling the story, meshed together.

The artwork is the highlight of the book for me. It is detailed, quite stunning and captures Rose's story perfectly …

Along with the personal stories of these two kids, Selznick also incorporates a bit of Deaf history/culture within the pages which I appreciated and hopefully its inclusion will educated Hearing readers about Deafness. But for such a unique way to tell a story, the actual story itself was slow moving and a bit predictable. 

Overall, I enjoyed this book and look forward to seeing the movie.