27 May 2011 WONDERSTRUCK by Brian Selznick, Scholastic Press, September 2011, 640p., ISABN: 978-0-545-02789-2
"A curator's job is an important one, for it is the curator who decides what belongs in the museum. The curator then must decide exactly how the objects will be displayed. In a way, anyone who collects things in the privacy of his own home is a curator. Simply choosing how to display your things, deciding which pictures to hang where, and in which order your books belong, places you in the same category as a museum curator."
"It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed."-- Theodore Roosevelt (as quoted on the wall of the American Museum of Natural History)
Dinosaurs and wooly mammoths. The smell of street corner pretzels, chestnuts roasting over coals in tin buckets, and car exhaust. The towering buildings, the gray grime and the gray haze, and the unending streams of pedestrians and taxis. The din of honking of horns, the vibrations of the subway below, and the rumbling of trucks as they rev up and down, block by block, for each traffic light.
Those are my recollections of my very first visit to Manhattan, in the early 1960's, on a school field trip to the American Museum of Natural History. Talk about being wonderstruck!
For some reason, my parents never, ever brought us to Manhattan, despite its being but a few dozen miles westward of our suburban Long Island home. The closest to Manhattan I recall them taking us was that amazing day in 1964 that we spent in Queens experiencing the New York World's Fair. Fortunately, school field trips made up for this deficiency. You can keep Disney's theme parks. To me, the American Museum of Natural History and Manhattan have always been places of wonder.
Last year, while staying in New York for Book Expo, I walked over to the Museum and wandered through it once again. Nearly half a century after my first visit to Manhattan and the Museum, the tastes and smells and sights were just as glorious. As were the dinosaurs and the wooly mammoths.
"Ben ran his hand along the shiny, undulating surface.
"It was smooth to the touch. He read the nearby sign and thought about the meteorite his mom had described to him, the one that had created Gunflint Lake two billion years ago. Had it been bigger than this one? And if a meteorite was the same as a shooting star, could you still make a wish even after it had fallen to Earth?"
My unceasing kinship with both New York City and the American Museum of Natural History is one of the many reasons I found myself consuming Brian Selznick's 640-page WONDERSTRUCK in one big wonderful gulp. Billed as "a novel in words and pictures," it features two intertwining stories set fifty years apart (1927 and 1977) involving two different young people. What connects the two tales early on are the American Museum of Natural History, the young characters' respective hearing defects, and their respective senses of loneliness and longing.
The 1927 story, which involves Rose, a young deaf girl from Hoboken, New Jersey, is entirely conveyed through hundreds of stunning full-page drawings. Being freed of the space limitations of the typical 32- or 40-page picturebook, Selznick sometimes employs a breathtakingly-effective, cinematic style of panning in for closeups over the course of a half-dozen drawings.
Meanwhile, the 1977 portion, told through words, is about a deaf boy named Ben who arrives, alone, in New York City, having taken a bus from Minnesota. He is mourning the death of his librarian mother in an accident, and he is hoping to follow a few clues he holds in order to find the father he has never known. When these clues yield only dead ends, he ends up at the Museum.
The two initially distant and distinct stories eventually merge in a most wonderful fashion.
"When I was a boy I watched the wolves.
When I was a boy I watched the wolfpack
Run, I watched the wolves 'till the mornin' sun."
-- Paul Kantner
There are several more notable aspects to this story and to the book.
First, and most importantly, is the extent to which readers will become enlightened as to deafness and Deaf culture through getting to know Rose and Ben. Given the stature of this book and the lengths to which Selznick has gone in getting this aspect of the story right makes this a landmark tale in terms of understanding what it is to be deaf. I cannot imagine a book more worthy of the Schneider Family Book Award which "honors an author or illustrator for a book that embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences."
Second, is the back matter. When you are already over 600 pages, there is no problem devoting five additional pages to Acknowledgements. And these five truly amazing pages of small type are the most wondrous revelation of the creative process as Selznick reveals in detail how different aspects of the story have come about as the result of a lifetime of personal experience; the extensive research he did; and fortuitous circumstance.
Speaking of fortuitous circumstance, I once again begin teaching Picturebooks for Older Readers to library school students next week. Boy, will they get an earful about the hundreds of full-page, mind-blowing drawings here.
Richie Partington, MLIS
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