“Call and Response: The Story of Black Lives Matter” by Veronica Chambers with Jennifer Harlan.“Murder Among Friends” by Candace Fleming.“The Epic Story of Every Living Thing” by Deb Caletti.“The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen” by Isaac Blum.“I Could Not Do Otherwise: The Remarkable Life of Dr.“Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix” by Anna-Marie McLemore.“Iveliz Explains it All” by Andrea Beatriz Arango.See the trailer and listen to the author speak of the creating process. The excellent movie, “Hugo,” is taken from Selznick’s first such book, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” (Scholastic 2007), a Caldecott Medal winner. “Wonderstruck” is not a graphic novel with multiple frames per page, but it is sequential art. Rose and Ben’s realistic connection is more than satisfying. The two stories converge in a surprising manner, leaving the reader feeling rather ebullient. Is it the same place that’s depicted on Rose’s post card? Is Rose seeing the same dinosaur skeleton that Ben just passed? Ben enters the American Museum of Natural History. In both stories-the pictorial and the written-each child, separated by fifty years, is running away to New York. This time they’re running down the streets of New York City. Was the house struck by lightning? He dreams of wolves again. Where are Rose’s parents? Who is Ben’s father? At the moment that Ben finds a clue in his mother’s closet, he blacks out.īen wakes up in a hospital bed, now completely deaf.

It’s storming in both stories, which heightens the mystery.

Turn another page and we return to the written story-Ben’s story, which parallels the story of the girl-Rose, who we realize is deaf. The girl runs outside into an urban setting. She’s making a scrapbook of the actress Lillian Mayhew. Turn the page and we’re back to exquisitely rendered drawings of a young girl in New Jersey, 1927.

But sell his house? What about his stuff? All he has with him is a box of bird skeletons and found odds and ends.Įven though a storm is brewing Ben runs to the house where he lived with his mom. Through the wall, Ben, who is deaf in one ear, hears his aunt and uncle talk about selling his Mom’s house at the other end of the property. So it was a dream? The written story begins in Gunflint Lake, Minnesota in 1977. They’re so close you see only their eyes, then so close, one eye and then closer yet. It opens with wolves running at the reader. “Wonderstruck” (Scholastic 2011) is a novel by Brian Selznick, told half in writing, half in drawings.

Wonderstruck by brian selznick