Wonder

R. J. Palacio's Wonder is a school story for 9 year olds, narrated by a boy who has never been to school and is about to start.

What happens

August Pullman is ten. He eats ice cream, he rides his bike, he plays on his XBox. He says that makes him fairly ordinary, and he means it.

The complication is his face. He will not describe it for you, which is the first clever thing this book does, because it makes you sit with your own imagination for a while instead of his.

He has had twenty seven operations. That is why he has been taught at home rather than the way people assume. Now he is strong enough, and his mum thinks he needs to learn more than she can teach him, and a school called Beecher Prep has a place for him in the fifth grade.

He is, in his own word, petrified.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about this book. It is funny. Properly funny. Auggie's favourite story is the one about the night he was born, and it stars a nurse who would not stop farting, a doctor who fainted clean away on the floor and a father who dropped the video camera. His mum acts out all the parts, including the noises, and he and his sister fall apart laughing every time.

Then the same story turns, very quietly, into his mum being told he probably would not live until morning, and the nurse who stayed and held her hand. That is the whole book in one chapter.

What your reader will get is Auggie's own account of things. He is dry about the looking away that people do. He is sharp about his sister Via, who says she sees him as ordinary but yells at anyone who stares. He is honest that when his parents discussed school he sat on his mum's lap and made his voice go babyish on purpose, because he wanted his dad to win.

Now the honest part. This is a book about how other children react to a face, and it does not soften that. In the first few pages Auggie tells you that children have run away screaming from him in playgrounds, and that he is stared at wherever he goes. He says it calmly. Your reader may not feel calm about it. For a child who has ever been the one stared at, this will land very close to home, and that is exactly why it is worth reading together.

What to read next

If they want that first day from the other side of the room, The Boy at the Back of the Class opens with a chair nobody has sat in all term, a head teacher pointing at it, and the entire class turning round at once to look.