Wonder

Let's start with the good: I thought that Wonder was an amazing and nuanced view of the social intricacies from late elementary school to early high school. By introducing multiple perspectives, RJ Palacio has written one of the most insightful pieces about how people inadvertently become bullies, alienate their friends or switch social groups. It rang very true, and more informed than a lot of the non-fiction references about bullying.

I also liked having a book about someone with a craniofacial anomaly. Too often disability characters in YA are completely sanitized: “normal person in a wheelchair!” style. Auggie was a great and honest portrayal of a kid with Treacher Collins. I know many kids like Auggie in real life, and I think this is the first book that they get about them. I liked that she pulled no punches in describing his surgeries, and his difficulty eating and articulating and also no punches in giving him a personality that went beyond his disability with his love for Star Wars, sense of humor and insight into people's ways of thinking.

But, I didn't love it. Perhaps because I've spent a lot of time with kids with craniofacial anomalies, it didn't have the same newness to me as to a lot of other readers. Or because, as a professional geneticist, I got really distracted by the fact that he has biallelic TCOF1 mutations, or that he has both a new, previously unknown recessive form of Treacher Collins and OAV spectrum. (I'm not sure in what universe someone would make a diagnosis of OAVS, a clinical diagnosis, in a kid with molecularly confirmed TCS, who doesn't have any facial asymmetry, but.) Or that they didn't use the words “Treacher Collins” in the whole book? I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again: authors who want a geneticist consultant, I'm for hire! Pay me in books.

But honestly, I had two other huge concerns: the first is Auggie winning the community service award at the end. I found this super frustrating and shallow compared to the more nuanced take in the rest of the book. Auggie didn't do any community service just by existing. The “point” of people with disabilities is not to be a fable for children without disabilities to learn from. He's an actual human being who should actually do some community service to get a community service award. That dehumanization really undermined a huge portion of the book for me, and made me feel hesitant to recommend it to children with disabilities.

My other concern is unfair for a book review, but stick with me: they chose a child without a craniofacial anomaly to portray Auggie in the movie? In a world that has thousands of actual children with craniofacial anomalies, who will never ever have a chance to play a protagonist in basically any other movie, and they took a typical kid and put him in disability drag? Overall, that choice, combined with the ending of the book made me really concerned that RJ Palacio doesn't really believe that atypical children are human beings with their own personhood and reason for being, rather than a tool for her to write moralistic novels.