Read 365 Days of Wonder free in the Little Reads app.
R. J. Palacio's 365 Days of Wonder is a companion book for 11 year olds, built from short sayings and the stories behind them.
Mr Browne is the English teacher from Auggie's school. He collects precepts. Words to live by, as he puts it to his class.
His own first one came from a seventeenth century writer he happens to share a name with. The line is about carrying inside us the wonders we go looking for elsewhere. He wrote it on a slip of paper and taped it to his wall. It went with him to graduate school and then into his wallet. His wife had it framed.
That is the shape of the whole book. A precept for every single day, all three hundred and sixty five of them, and every so often Mr Browne stops to tell you where one came from.
Some of those bits are very funny. His grandmother beat his grandfather at Scrabble for fifty years because she just played whatever tiles she got. He hoarded his good letters waiting for a triple word score.
Some are not funny at all. Mr Browne describes sitting at a school play and watching three girls snigger at a former pupil the moment she walked onstage. He leaned forward and mouthed two words at them. The girl's mum saw all of it.
Then there are the postcards. His pupils send him precepts over the summer and some of those letters are here too. One girl writes about old stars shrinking and exploding and scattering their dust, and how that dust is what people are made of. Isn't that lovely?
This is not a story. There is no plot to follow and nothing to finish, so it suits a dip in and out reader far better than one who wants to be carried along.
It also assumes your reader already knows these children. Names arrive with no introduction and one boy's email quietly tells you how his school year ended. Read cold, a lot of that will land flat.
It is American too, so expect fifth grade and middle school rather than Year 6.
So save this one for afterwards. Auggie's own story in Wonder is the one to read first, and the precepts will mean a great deal more once they already care about the people writing them.
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