Wonderstruck
Author: Brian Selznick
Publisher: Scholastic Inc
Price: $34.99 (hardback)
If a picture paints a thousand words...
Brian Selznick's debut
book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret,
made a huge impact (as the blurb on my Advance Reader's copy is keen to
make clear) winning 
The Caldecott Medal, making it as a
finalist in America's National Book Award and earning that all
important No. 1 New York Times Bestseller position.
I loved it too and we will all soon be able to see the film version as
directed by Martin Scorsese (although judging by that trailer I'd give
the film a miss and just get a copy of the rather lovely book) but
after all that success you always wonder what an author, and
illustrator, will do next. Selznick's new book tells two stories; one
with words, one with pictures, the two eventually combining as the
plots merge. Selznick may have dazzled with his artwork but does he
have the prose to match it when the two are placed side by side?
The story begins with pictures, a pair of wolves run towards
us, Selznick's 'camera-eye' zooming in up close to their eyes. After
those few pages of pictures we are then in Gunflint Lake, Minnesota in
the summer of 1977 and the written story of Ben Wilson. He awakes after
a recurring dream where he is being chased by wolves. Ben was born deaf
in one ear, has never known who his father was, and now lives with his
aunt and uncle after the death of his mother. On a stormy night he
finds a blue book amongst her possessions, a history of museums
entitled Wonderstruck, with a dedication and a bookmark that suddenly
provides what he thinks might be clues to his father's identity. This
discovery will set him off on a journey of discovery but not before the
power of the storm around him alters the way he will experience the
world outside.
The pictures then transport us to Hoboken, New Jersey in 1927
and the
story of Rose, a deaf girl who lives separated from her film-star
mother virtually imprisoned by her strict father. Being deaf we
experience the world just as she does through Selznick's
black-and-white drawings as she makes her escape to New York City and
the American Museum of Natural History.
So this book is a bit of a disappointment after Hugo Cabret, an easy-read and even an interesting one, especially after having read Selznick's acknowledgements at the back where he details what he discovered about deaf culture, the advent of talking movies and The American Museum of Natural History amongst other things, but nowhere nearly as impressive as the monochrome magic of his debut. To answer the question raised by the headline; if a picture paints a thousand words then why write words at all?
William Rycroft
To read more of William Rycroft's book reviews, check out his blog at Just William's Luck.