Wonderstruck<\/i> alternates between two (intertwining) stories, one told in words and the other told in pictures, and it totally worked for me—it’s dreamy and beautiful and very satisfyingly full of excellent New York City scenes\/moments. The book starts with Ben, a twelve-year-old kid in northeastern Minnesota in 1977. His mom died in a car accident three months ago; he’s living with his aunt and uncle and cousins and feeling adrift—his mom raised him alone (he doesn’t know anything about his dad) and they were close\/he misses her lots. After we learn a little about Ben (how he was born deaf in one ear, how he’s always been a quiet\/solitary kid, how he has a wooden box in which he keeps little treasures—rocks and twigs and a fossil and such) we jump to Rose, a twelve-year-old kid in Hoboken in 1927. She’s solitary, too, and isolated, partly because she’s a deaf child of hearing parents who worry it’s not safe for her to navigate the world by herself. (We see her sneaking out to go to a silent movie, and then to a theatre in Manhattan.) Back to Ben: a series of events leads to him getting on a bus to New York City, having found some things in his mom’s bedroom that make him think his father might be there, and that he might be able to find him.<\/p>\n
I don’t want to say more because so much of the pleasure of this book is in watching the stories unfold, but I will say that, in a nod to From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler<\/i>, Ben ends up sleeping at the American Museum of Natural History, and it’s totally excellent. The NYC-drawings are some of my favorite things in this book—dioramas and a cabinet-of-wonders exhibit at AMNH, the Panorama at the Queens Museum of Art (now the Queens Museum), the Unisphere, buildings with lit-up windows, the city skyline. It’s all so lovely. Here is a picture I took when I was reading this the other day, so you can see some of Selznick’s art:<\/p>\n\n