Wonder - by R.J.Palacio: A Brief Review

Sometimes, strange things happen. On a single day last week, two things happened to me: A colleague lent me her copy of Wonder by R.J.Palacio and another colleague forwarded me a link to a TED talk by Lizzie Velasquez titled How Do YOU Define Yourself. (For those of you who have not heard of Lizzie Velasquez, she was born with a rare abnormality that rendered her body completely unable to store any fat at all and causing her to be labelled and ridiculed as 'the ugliest woman in the world'.)

Now when such random events accumulate together, you would think there's a lesson in all of this somewhere. That's what I thought too - when a quick glance in the mirror assured me that I didn't look any uglier than I usually did, I decided that the lesson was somewhere deeper than that.

I read the book and watched the video, and this is what I came up with.

Being beautiful and feeling beautiful are two completely different things. The little group of us met again a little later over coffee. If you looked at us, you would think of us as average-, maybe even above-average-looking women. In fact, if you looked at us from the right angles, you might even think we were attractive. And yet, each of us had at least one story to share when we were made to feel repugnant, ugly, hideous. Too dark, too short, too fat, too thin, you name it.

Wonder is one of those books that you read relishing each word, savoring them, and then when it's done, go back and re-read some parts of it that you had mentally marked (at least I had to mentally mark them as the book was borrowed from a friend.)

The book revolves around 10-year-old August (Auggie), who suffers from an incredibly rare and unpronounceable facial deformity. By the time the book begins, the worst of his health problems appear to be already behind him, and it is only the social and emotional angles that apparently need to be focused on.

 

The book heralds his entry into regular school and thus into society, after having been home schooled thus far. We see him being taken "like a lamb to the slaughter" and follow his sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes euphoric journey from being the 'orc' or 'Freddie Krueger' to becoming Auggie Pullman, a regular little fifth-grader. He looks exactly the same as he did when he started, the difference is all in the eyes that view him, and more importantly, in how he views himself.

The book is mostly presented from behind Auggie's 'hooded droopy eyelids'. Children can be cruel, we all know that and so it seems can adults. We see the different forms of cruelty - the malicious if childish cruelty of Julian the bully and the more dignified yet doubly reprehensible cruelty of his parents (apples really don't fall far from the tree), the unintentional cruelty of almost everyone who sees him for the first time, and sometimes even of people who have known him forever, the inadvertent cruelty of his only friend and ally, Jack Will, a particularly heartbreaking moment. You fight the urge to gently close his deformed and misshapen ears and protect him from the betrayal of his only friend. His sister Via (short for Olivia) assumes that she is being incredibly cruel when she decides not to tell anyone in her new school about Auggie, so that for once in her life, she can be free of his constant presence in her life.

The universe has been unkind to Auggie is a message that is thrust on us again and again.It is only somewhat at the end of the book, through the eyes of Auggie's sister's boyfriend do we see the other side of the situation:

 

"My head swirls on this, but then softer thoughts soothe, like a flatted third on a major chord. no, no, it's not all random, if it really was all random, the universe would abandon us completely, and the universe doesn't. It takes care of its most fragile creations in ways we can't see. Like with parents who adore you blindly. And a big sister who feels guilty for being human over you. And a little gravelly-voiced kid whose friends have left him over you. And even a pink-haired girl who carries your picture in her wallet. Maybe it is a lottery, but the universe makes it all even out in the end. The universe takes care of all its birds.”

This is a beautiful book, reflecting both the beauty and the ugliness in the world around the little boy.

Flip side? Well, in a way the book is structured like a social experiment of sorts, a documentary of the journey of August Pullman into society. In documentary-style we see the same episodes from different points of view. The feel is of different people looking into the character and mouthing their words at times. And the end of the book is a little predictable - it couldn't have ended any other way.

 

Those are just a few faded scars in a supremely beautiful book - a book that is beautiful beyond its beautiful cover.