It was about this time last year that I read Brian Selznick’s Caldecott Medal winning book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and at that time I swore I’d have to read his other epic volumes too. It must be the weather, cold and rainy Minnesota springs, that makes me want to snuggle up to a 600-page kids book again! But what a pleasure they are to read.

Of course, Selznick’s books actually are massive volumes of 600+ pages, yet not every page is filled with text. Instead, the books include maybe 70 pages of text with all the other pages telling the story in another way, through what seems like charcoal illustrations filled emotion and mystery.

This book, Wonderstruck, follows two seemingly unrelated storylines simultaneously. The illustrated story follows a young deaf girl in the 1920s as she runs away to New York, while the story in text follows a young deaf boy in Gunflint, MN, as he makes the same harrowing venture to the East. There’s no indication that the stories are related beyond the characters’ deafness until pretty late in the book, so at first glance, they’re hard to follow. But stick with it, because they make for a pretty interesting mesh.

The concept of crafting a visual story about a deaf girl with virtually no text at all is intriguing, and Selznick artfully shares with his hearing readers a sample of what life in such a world must be like. Incidentally, it’s interesting how sensory our language can be, as seen in the previous sentence. For “shares a sample of” I could have written “gives a glimpse of” or “gives a touch of,” “a taste,” “a vision,” “a sense,” etc. But there’s not really a hearing or smelling version of this phraseology, is there? There’s something kinda fishy about that.

I recently started reading the Pulitzer Prize winning book, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and I was reminded in the novel’s first several chapters of Selznick’s Hugo Cabret. There’s something about the Frenchness, perhaps, or the slightly magical feel of a child lost in a very European setting that triggered the connection. But then as I read this book with its dioramas and handicapped children, I realized how much more reminiscent of Wonderstruck it actually is! Having enjoyed these graphic books so much, I’m actually more motivated now to continue with Doerr’s WWII novel.

There’s much that can be learned about style and delivery from a storyteller like Brian Selznick, but one shouldn’t approach his books academically. Read them and let them draw you in to their story and world. No promise that they’ll leave you Wonderstruck, but I think you’ll enjoy them all the same.

©2022 E.T.