Wonder was recommended by my 10 year old granddaughter. I am so glad that she is an avid reader, just like me, and she lent me her copy to read. It is suitable for any child of around 8 onwards and would be a good book to share with a child who is about to start “proper” school. That is to say, not kindergarten but primary school, or even secondary school.
August Pullman is going to school for the first time. He has been home-schooled up to this point because he was born with severe anomalies which have entailed a lot of operations, twenty-six so far, to correct a cleft palate and other cranial problems. These have left him looking different. He arrives in middle school and the results are complicated and challenging.
Wonder is how he copes, the people he comes across and the various ways in which he makes a difference to the lives of the other children. R J Palacio was inspired to write this story as a result of someone she saw, a small child, being teased outside an ice-cream shop.
Physical differences, or disabilites can be very challenging for young children. They are both curious and uninhibited, they will stare or ask questions and this can be uncomfortable for the adults and for the child. Auggie copes courageously with the people he encounters even though he experiences some markedly different reactions. Auggie has a particularly extreme complex, the medical term is mandibulofacial dystosis which has left his face much more disfigured than say a cleft palate reformation. Very small children are actually frightened, older ones can be very unkind.
In Auggie & Me we meet three young people who have encountered Auggie. The first is Julian, and this section untangles some of the impulses and actions that Julian has meted out to Auggie when he arrived at Beecher’s Prep School. The second section is a friend from way before school, Christopher’s mother and Auggie’s mother were pregnant at the same time and formed with two other mother’s an unofficial mum’s group, all of them and their children hung out together, until Christopher moved away and they rather lost touch. The final section in Auggie & Me is the voice of Charlotte, whom we also met in Wonder.
Both these books look kindly upon all the characters that we meet, not excusing bad behaviour or sanctifying the better natured children. They are a way of helping young people to come to terms with difference and to be kind, to themselves as well as to each other. To value kindness as a gift that they can receive and give. Important lessons that we could all learn from.
deborahjs 