But the sound of approaching footsteps panics the pair of Picassos. After all, the opportunity to become a “pig-e-phant” doesn’t come around every day. An ear pulled here and an extra eye placed there, and before you can shake a carving stick, a spurt of frenetic self-exploration-expressed as a tangled black scribble-reveals a succession of smug hybrid beasts. The owl is pleased, but the wolf convinces it that the best is yet to come. The hands disappear, leaving the friends to their own devices. A pair of hands descends, and soon, amid a flurry of squishing and prodding and poking and sculpting, a handsome gray wolf and a stately brown owl emerge. The gray anticipates an adventure, while the brown appears apprehensive. Reinvention is the name of the game for two blobs of clay.Ī blue-eyed gray blob and a brown-eyed brown blob sit side by side, unsure as to what’s going to happen next.

Palacio has perhaps mined the same material once too often.Ī feel-good volume lacking the wonder of Wonder. Auggie’s first-person point of view is too narrow to allow for the range of voices that made the novel so rich. Borrowing the now-iconic stylized image of a nearly featureless, one-eyed, white Auggie from the original hardcover edition and employing colorful, digitally rendered art, this edition pulls the heartwarming spirit from Wonder but little of the substance. But with no characterization and little in the text beyond inspirational messages, it’s not clear what makes Auggie a wonder he wants to be taken as he is, but readers-unless they have read the other volumes-never come to know him. But I can hear them.” His mother tells him he’s a wonder in fact, “we’re all wonders,” Auggie informs readers. They even say mean things behind my back.

Though it takes knowledge of previous installments in the Wonder series to understand that Auggie has serious facial deformities and has had many corrective surgeries, it is clear what Auggie endures from other kids: “Sometimes they stare at me. Though Auggie tries to do the normal things other kids do-ride a bike, eat ice cream, play ball-he doesn’t look like other kids. Auggie, from the bestselling novel Wonder (2012), returns as a picture-book protagonist.

We're All Wonders by R.J. Palacio