Wonder, by R. J. Palacio

Hello!

I'm doing another book review. The reason is because I have officially been alive for two decades; also, this book is quite a special book to me. Confession: Harry Potter is not my favourite book. Lord of the Rings is not my favourite book. Wonder is my favourite book, because I relate to the main character, August Pullman, quite a lot - more, I think, than I relate to any other character.

A wonder-ful book!

August is a ten-year-old boy with Treacher-Collins syndrome. Treacher-Collins syndrome is (to quote Wikipedia), characterised by deformities of the ears, eyes, cheekbones and chin. It has no impact on intelligence; however, August, at the time the story starts, has spent his life up till then being home-schooled, partly because he still experiences a lot of difficulties. The story starts with his parents enrolling him in a middle-school (it's set in America), as they want him to experience more of the wider world.

The plot of the book revolves around August's first year in public education: the main characters, other than August, are his sister Olivia, his parents, his friends Summer and Jack, Olivia's friend Miranda, and Olivia's boyfriend. Also August's bully, Julian.

Movie poster - left to right is August's dad, Olivia, August himself, the dog, and his mum.

The book starts with August's parents enrolling him in the school; the school year starts with August meeting Jack and Julian, who were friends from early childhood. They've been assigned by the head-teacher to befriend August. Jack does a pretty good job of it; Julian, on the other hand, starts off by asking if August was caught in a fire! Things only go downhill from there: Julian (feeling threatened by August's friendship with Jack, I guess) starts being actively horrible to August. Jack ends up getting caught in the middle, forced to choose between his best friend and August; things come to a head on Halloween, when Jack, compelled by peer-pressure, says some rather horrible things about August, without realising he's nearby. Unsurprisingly, August isolates himself from his classmates and friends; eventually, though, Summer, another one of August's friends, finds out what happened and tells Jack. Jack, guilt-ridden and becoming increasingly unsure that Julian is someone he wants to be friends with, eventually punches Julian in the face. After this, his friendship with August is repaired, though at the cost that Julian's bullying of August extends to Jack as well. 

Jack and August in the movie.

Olivia, meanwhile, has her own problems - she's spent most of her life defined by being 'August Pullman's older sister'. Also, Miranda has been avoiding her since the start of the school year (this is later revealed to be because Miranda essentially committed fraud and pretended that August was her brother at a summer camp, and now feels guilty.) As a result, when Olivia starts at a new school, where hardly anybody knows her, she starts distancing herself from being 'August Pullman's older sister'. This means that nobody at school knows about August, and nobody at home knows how she's doing at school. This comes to a head when Olivia gets a part for a play. Olivia reveals to her mum that she doesn't want August (or the rest of her family) to see the play. Can you guess what happens next? August overhears this, and is naturally very upset. Olivia, being a good sister, relents and allows her family to come to the play. Miranda is also in the play, as it happens - Olivia's her understudy. She goes on stage at the beginning, sees August, and is so overwhelmed with guilt for claiming that he was her brother that she decides that she can't play; Olivia takes her place. After the play, August gets lost, but Miranda finds him. Olivia's also looking for him, which results in the two girls reuniting and repairing their friendship.

Olivia with August.

From there, August's year starts getting better. Julian's bullying is still happening (by way of a rather horrible game of pretending that August has the plague!), but August mostly shrugs it off. The turning point in the bullying is one of my favourite scenes in the book - August jokingly tells a friend that the UglyDolls brand of toys was based on him. After this, people start realising that he's funny and cool (not to mention, confident enough to make jokes about his disabilities), and they get bored of bullying him. Even Julian's closest friends stop - but Julian himself doesn't.

At the end of the year, there's a three-day nature reserve trip, which August is initially apprehensive about, in part because he's now got a hearing-aid which is not inconspicuous. In the end, he decides to go anyway. The new hearing aid turns out to be a non-issue for his classmates; on the other hand, however, those who don't know him aren't so friendly. August has a chance encounter with several highly immature teenagers, who start mocking him and beating him. He's rescued by Julian's ex-friends, but it turns out that the hearing-aid has gone missing. It later turns up mangled beyond repair.

At the end of the school year, August wins an award for 'being notable or exemplary in certain areas', and his mum name-drops the title, calling him her wonder.

I, uh, won a similar award, for similar reasons.

Wonder is a very interesting book - it shows the world through the perspective of someone with disabilities. And of course that's not in itself unique, even though Treacher-Collins is a very rare syndrome. There are many books and films which focus on disabled people and their lives, some of which are fictionalised, and some of which are based on real-life events. What makes Wonder unique is the fact that it focuses on the social dimension of being - as the book says - 'born to stand out'. As a result of his disabilities, August finds it very difficult to make friends - he's not the...most photogenic person. Various times, younger children see August and, bluntly, are so scared of him that they burst into tears; even children of August's own age are uncomfortable around him. This discomfort, combined with the admirable maturity of fifth-graders, makes August prime bullying material, which leaves him very isolated.

It's something I can very much relate to. While (I assume) nobody was scared of me, I've always felt isolated, in a way. The most obvious reason being my hearing-aids - I find it difficult to hear in loud environments, which means I can't keep up easily in conversations, and I feel left out. It's partly why I spent so much of my adolescence feeling like I didn't have friends. Even now, I struggle with insecurities over friendship, and that's part of the reason why. Another aspect of this isolation, for me, is the fact that I quite literally don't fit in. I'm deaf, which partially alienates me from the hearing world, but I feel more at home around non-deaf people than around deaf people. I'm British, but raised in Africa. Similarly, after returning to England, I adjusted to life back in England far faster than you'd think, considering I grew up in Africa. Even with my CHARGE Syndrome - it's rare enough that each individual case is entirely unique, each case having a different arrangement of symptoms. And everything I am is because of CHARGE Syndrome. No balance canals? CHARGE. Deafness and coloboma? CHARGE. High pain threshold? CHARGE. Tendency to become obsessed with certain things (e.g. the human body)? CHARGE. Almost everything which makes me who I am derives from a syndrome which is so rare that literally nobody else in the world can fully relate. Other people can (and do) relate to various aspects - I'm friends with other deaf people. A friend at university grew up in Africa, just like me, and my sister and cousins also grew up in Africa. Many of my friends have poor eyesight. But nobody in the world would truly be able to relate to the sum of those parts, which is soul-crushingly isolating. I would love nothing more than to not have CHARGE, even to just be only deaf. And it's true that everybody is the sum of their experiences, but sometimes it feels like everything I am stems from something which occurred before I was born. But, as Wonder says, how can you blend in when you were born to stand out? It's why I relate to August so much - Treacher-Collins is fairly rare. So while we don't have the same syndrome, we do both understand something of being practically unique.

Another thing Wonder does is depict the perspectives of people who know August - the impact that he has on their lives. His family, for instance, have had to schedule their lives around August's condition and his subsequent need for assistance. His mum had to quit her job to home-school him (though this was admittedly partially because other children wouldn't have the emotional maturity to be nice to him.) His sister, poor Olivia, is very independent for her age, because their parents often had their hands full looking after August. So if she had a problem, she'd generally need to solve it herself. Also, she's known as 'August Pullman's older sister', which pushes her to form her own identity, separate from being August's sister. Miranda, similarly, considers herself as good as August's sister, due to her close friendship with Olivia - and it's August's presence at the play which enables her to strengthen her relationship with Olivia.

It's a good demonstration of the ways in which people's lives are impacted by knowing somebody with disabilities. It's a similar story with the people I know - my parents have had to devote a lot of time, effort and money to supporting me, e.g. accompanying me to hospital appointments for ears, eyes, endocrinology, annual check-ups, and so on. And my sister, similarly to Olivia, has been rather over-shadowed by being 'Robert Murrell's little sister'. She started at secondary school the year after I did, and found that everybody knew her as my little sister. As a result, she wanted to establish her own identity, and over time it created distance between us, which hasn't entirely gone away even now. Though speaking as a proud older brother, she certainly succeeded at establishing her own identity!

Regarding my own experiences with bullies, I honestly don't have a clue why the bullying started. My main bully could have felt upset that I was deaf and still in mainstream school. Or, he could have been jealous that I was reasonably academically successful and liked by the teachers. The most he ever said on the subject was that I was 'arrogant', because I'd tell other students to behave. But then, he never had a problem telling me what to do. It's something I often think about - whether my deafness factored in to the bullying in some way.

Another thing I really like about Wonder is how it presents disabled people as essentially normal people with certain difficulties. Apart from his condition and the attendant issues it causes, he's a fairly normal ten-year-old. He's a big fan of Star Wars, and starts the book off with a Padawan braid. When he receives the hearing aid, he receives a consolation in that it makes him look like Lobot; August's response is 'But Lobot's lame.' And when he finds out that Olivia's got a boyfriend around half-way through the book, he immediately does what siblings are contractually obligated to do - he starts teasing her. Another aspect of this is the sub-plot of the family dog getting ill. August's so consumed with his various other problems that he fails to truly realise how ill the dog is, which I think is something which a lot of people, and especially children, do.

It's a good reflection of how disabled people are just people, who happen to have more problems to deal with than most do.

Overall, I would rate Wonder 9/10 - I highly recommend!

Random observations

-There's a movie, which is fairly accurate to the book. I like it. I saw one of my classmates while watching it at the cinema.

-The movie does a pretty clever version of August and Jack's reconciliation - they chat while playing Minecraft. In the book, that takes the form of letters/texts.

-Olivia's boyfriend's perspective is one of the perspectives in the book. The entire section is written in lower-case, which is a rather interesting stylistic choice.

-In fitting with August's fondness for Star Wars, the dog's called Darth Daisy. But the 'Darth' bit is usually dropped.

-At one point in the book, August and Summer notice that they both have names relating to summer, as does Julian (July), so their lunch table could be the summer table, and they could include Julian. It's ironic, given Julian's behaviour...

-At one point, Julian asks August if his favourite Star Wars character is Palpatine, because of Palpatine's appearance. Unsurprisingly, August doesn't just pick his favourite characters based off apparent similarities in appearance - his favourite's actually Boba Fett. A sentiment I can second, though my favourite character is Obi-Wan.

-My mum, like August's mum, quit teaching. Unlike Mrs. Pullman, my mum quit to become a Bible translator - I hadn't been born yet.

-One thing that has garnered a fair amount of criticism for the movie, and the book to an extent, is the fact that it downplays the difficulties of life with disabilities - August's able to solve the bullying through kindness. In real life, tragically, that's not as likely.

The Woman Who Fell to Earth/The Ghost Monument: A New Era

 Hello!

I've split the Twelfth Doctor's regeneration episode and the Thirteenth Doctor's premier episodes into two posts, because the Twelfth Doctor's swan song is three parts. Then the Thirteenth Doctor's premier is split into two as well! The first episode of Series 11 deals with the Doctor's adjustment process and ends on a cliffhanger. The second deals with the Doctor and her new companions finding the TARDIS. Fittingly, Whittaker's first episode features new characters, new aliens, and even a new location - the Doctor's relocated to Sheffield! Even the TARDIS and sonic screwdriver get thrown out - the TARDIS disappears, and the sonic screwdriver falls out of the Doctor's pocket en-route to the ground, necessitating her making a new one.

I think the tagline at the bottom sums it up.

The Woman who Fell to Earth

The Woman who Fell to Earth, like Rose (and, technically, Spearhead from Space), starts by introducing the new companions - first we get introduced to Ryan Sinclair, his grandma, Grace, and his step-grandad Graham. Ryan has dyspraxia, so he has coordination difficulties, and can't ride a bike; he's also 19. We open on him learning to ride a bike; he repeatedly falls off, ends up getting frustrated, and chucks the bike off a hill. Graham and Grace leave him to get the bike out of the trees, as their train leaves soon; they have a conversation about Ryan struggling to accept him. Ryan goes down to retrieve the bike  and finds a glowing button in mid-air. He presses it, which causes a mysterious blue object to appear; he then phones the police The next companion to be introduced is Yaz, a police-woman who's currently embroiled in solving a parking dispute. She's the one who responds to Ryan's strange phone call, though she suspects that he placed the object, then prank-called the police. The train which Graham and Grace are on gets attacked by a coil sparking electricity; Grace phones Ryan, who heads to the site with Yaz. The Doctor appears minutes later, punching through the roof with the power of terminal velocity! Ryan and Yaz turn up in time to get scanned by the coil, along with Graham, Grace, the Doctor and a guy called Karl. The Doctor falls unconscious and gets taken to Grace and Graham's house. When she wakes up, she realises that she and her new friends have been infected with DNA bombs, which are exactly what they sound like. She then re-formats Ryan's phone, which was lying around, into a device for tracking the coil. They locate the coil on a roof, stopping along the way so the Doctor can make herself a new sonic screwdriver; once they reach the coil, she sonics it. An alien, a Stenza called T'zim Sha, (or, as the Doctor calls him, Tim Shaw) appears and extracts information from the coil before teleporting away. It turns out that Shaw was there to capture a target; when the Stenza want to be promoted, they must first hunt and obtain a specific target. Shaw is cheating, though; he's using the coil to scan the area for the target to avoid having to look. The Doctor and friends realise that the target is Karl, the guy on the train, and learn that he works as a crane operator at the construction site; accordingly, they head there as well. Graham and Grace stay on the ground to escort people out of the construction site, while the Doctor, Yaz and Ryan climb up the crane next to his, so they can confront Shaw, who has captured Karl. During the confrontation, the Doctor bluffs Shaw into activating the DNA bombs...which she earlier transferred into the data coil, so when Shaw transferred the information he also transferred the bombs. As he collapses, Karl shoves him off the crane; he activates his recall device and escapes just before hitting the ground. At the same time, Graham and Grace dispose of the data coil, which is half-way up a crane, by jamming a live wire into it; as she does this, Grace loses her balance and falls, dying minutes later. The Doctor stays for the funeral - though she doesn't have much of a choice. After the funeral she builds a teleport device designed to take her to the TARDIS, out of the remains of Tim Shaw's travel pod. It malfunctions and drops her in deep space...along with Graham, Ryan and Yaz. Whoops.

And that was such a nice suit...

The Ghost Monument

In true Doctor Who fashion, the cliffhanger is overcome quickly: spaceships appear and rescue the Doctor and her companions. The Doctor and Yaz are picked up by a man called Epzo, while Graham and Ryan are picked up by a woman called Angstrom. When Yaz comes to, she hears the Doctor arguing with Epzo about the proper means of landing the ship. Epzo and Angstrom are participating in a race; the final planet of that race has been shifted out of its orbit. By coincidence, it's also where the TARDIS is - if all had gone to plan, presumably the Doctor and friends would have materialised on the planet. Angstrom successfully lands; Epzo is not so successful. He lands, but the ship crashes and nearly squashes the others. Epzo and Angstrom find a tent which is being holographically projected; in here, they learn that the next, and final, stage of their race is the titular Ghost Monument. The Ghost Monument, by the way, is the TARDIS - it's been stuck in a materialisation loop for thousands of years, long enough that the long-extinct natives of the planet have extensive documentation of it. Epzo and Angstrom head off, with the Doctor and her companions tagging along, as they need to reach the TARDIS to escape the planet. The journey takes several days, over the course of which they have several adventures. The most pertinent are an escape from SniperBots; the discovery that the natives were forced to create deadly super-weapons by the Stenza (the antagonists of the previous episode); and an encounter with sentient rags, during the course of which the rags cryptically mention the "Timeless Child". Eventually, Angstrom and Epzo reach the finish line; Epzo forces the organiser of the race to agree to a joint victory by threatening to torture him to death. Lovely! The Doctor and her friends, meanwhile, are still stranded, with the Doctor giving in to despair...until the TARDIS materialises. The Doctor stabilises it using her sonic screwdriver, then laments that she lost the key. The TARDIS doors obligingly open on their own, and the Doctor and her friends pile in; the Doctor then pilots the TARDIS away from the planet of horrors. Though the Doctor could have snapped her fingers to open the doors - the Doctor's displayed the ability to open the doors with a snap of their fingers since the Tenth Doctor. Solves the problem of needing the key, and impresses her new companions.

The Doctor and her companions. Clockwise (ignoring the dude in the centre), Yaz, Graham, the Doctor and Ryan. The centrepiece is the man who organised the race.

Overall, the Thirteenth Doctor's first two episodes are OK. They're definitely better than The Twin Dilemma or Time and the Rani, but they aren't as good as some episodes, such as Castrovalva, or The Christmas Invasion. The first episode has some contrivances, such as the Doctor happening to land exactly where the data coil is, or Graham's friend happening to see exactly what the Doctor is looking for. The characters are a bit...flat. The Doctor's companions barely react to being on an actual alien planet, or to seeing the interior of the TARDIS; it's especially jarring because the Thirteenth Doctor's companions are an elderly man who didn't even believe in aliens a few days ago, a police-woman and a 19-year-old warehouse worker; as a result, they have no reason to be so unsurprised.

Another element of this dodgy characterisation is the Doctor's random hatred of all violence. She gets angry at Karl for shoving Shaw off the crane, despite having literally just boastfully condemned him to a far more brutal death. She also allows Ryan to go play Call of Duty against the Sniperbots, anticipating that he will be outnumbered, to teach him that violence is never worth it. She later clarifies that it's OK if the thing you're breaking can be repaired, such as Sniperbots. Willingly risking a companion's life for a message she doesn't even believe in? Moreover, a companion who's 19? To me, that just comes off as irresponsible, even for the Doctor.

There's also the problem of under-utilised plot threads - the Stenza are significant throughout both episodes. Tim Shaw is the antagonist of the first episode, and the Stenza as a whole are the reason for Desolation being the way it is. But the Stenza get ignored after this - they literally never appear again. Apart from Tim Shaw in the final episode of Series 11, but he's once again a stand-alone villain. It's a pity, because the Stenza are an active empire during the 21st century, an era commonly frequented by the Doctor. So I feel there was a lot of potential for them to be great recurring villains - like the Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans of the Classic Era, or the Weeping Angels of the new era. This is especially in light of Angstrom saying that they're basically engaging in genocide on her home planet; they're an active imperial force, and actively committing mass slaughter - but nobody's doing anything. Though that is tragically realistic, I guess. However, it's not just a case of not caring - it's like the Stenza cease to exist after this episode, with the sole exception of Tim Shaw in the final episode of Series 11. After that, the Stenza just get forgotten about - by the characters, and seemingly by the writers.

Another element of this is the Timeless Child. The concept is promising - the idea is that the Time Lords didn't actually obtain their ability to regenerate or their supremacy over time through legitimate means (e.g. evolution). Instead, they performed a bunch of highly unethical experiments on the child in question, who did have the inborn ability to regenerate. One of the most promising things is the ethical question - is it right for the Doctor to use regeneration to survive and keep surviving, given how the Time Lords gained the ability? After all, that's the only reason the Doctor's survived so long - in Turn Left, part of the reason the Doctor's allies fall is because they can't regenerate. If the Doctor were in the same position, he'd have died back in The Tenth Planet. However, this genuinely interesting dilemma gets side-stepped by the reveal that the Doctor is the Timeless Child. There is no ethical dilemma, because those powers are the Doctor's by birth-right. Another aspect of this is the lack of development - the Timeless Child concept is brought up in The Ghost Monument. It's ignored for the rest of Series 11, then brought up again in the second episode of Series 12. After that, it's implied in episode 5, referenced in episode 7, and ignored until episode 10, whereupon it's revealed that the Doctor's the Timeless Child. Almost no build-up on the Timeless Child, none at all for the possibility that the Doctor's the Child...it just feels lazy. 

This is kind of a problem with this era as a whole. The companions and the Doctor are cardboard cut-outs, reduced to specific traits. Potentially interesting plotlines and moral dilemmas are ignored or drained of what makes them interesting. Political and social issues - something the show's always been famous for - are reduced to the simplest form possible, then used as an improvised bludgeoning weapon. Point of fact, a later episode discusses global warming and climate change. It ends up being about as subtle as Rubeus Hagrid knocking down a door - the Doctor even blatantly exposits on the urgency of preventing climate change. Indeed, this 'subtlety' is down-right off-putting - not only is that episode my least favourite episode of Doctor Who, it has the lowest ratings of that series (series 12). It's the same as Time and the Rani, in some ways - the Thirteenth Doctor's era has potential, but it doesn't seem quite capable of achieving that potential. Even the latest series, which a lot of people have called miles better than what came before, is still a disorganised mess, trying to balance a million different plotlines, ideas and characters. Though I will say this - I still think that, on the whole, the show hasn't sunk as low as it did for Time and the Rani.

Overall, I would rate The Woman who Fell to Earth 7/10 and The Ghost Monument 5/10.

Random observations

-Ryan's dyspraxia is another example of an under-utilised plot element - it rarely comes up over the next two series. I feel like there was a lot of potential behind a companion who has a disability. Especially as I am myself disabled, though in a different way.

-Yaz has a rather amusing predicament in the first episode - she wants to be trusted with bigger stuff than parking disputes. However, she's the same age as Ryan - 19. Being on the police force at all at that age is quite the achievement on its own, in my opinion. Also, she has the opportunity, in the form of reporting the events on the train, to prove that she can be trusted to handle serious situations. Instead of reporting it, she keeps quiet on the word of the Doctor - who's a civilian. And not entirely of sound mind (to an ordinary person, anyway), if she's rambling about having been male and elderly half an hour ago. Maybe Yaz's superiors had the right idea?

-I do like the way the Doctor describes the process of regeneration - every cell in your body burning, and a feeling of coming close to death, just before being born again.

-There's a bit where the Doctor and her companions learn that Ryan's button-pressing summoned the alien. Graham and Grace immediately go off on Ryan, in different, though mutually horrifying, ways: Grace has a go at him for not having the precognitive ability to simply know that pressing the button will summon an alien. Graham, meanwhile, tries to accuse Ryan of using his dyspraxia as an excuse for potentially starting an alien invasion. And he wonders why Ryan doesn't like him - don't know about you, but I can think of a pretty good reason why!

-Amusingly, though, this particular trait of Graham's falls by the wayside after this episode. In fact, he never again so much as acts negatively towards Ryan, which makes up for the comment in my mind. Perhaps the writers realised Graham's statement in  The Woman Who Fell to Earth came off looking really, really bad?

-I feel like another under-utilised plot thread in The Ghost Monument is the titular Ghost Monument. To me, there was considerable promise in a premise where the Doctor spends the bulk of Series 11 trapped away from the TARDIS and trying to get back to it. Especially as it would maintain the serialised format which characterised the Smith and Capaldi eras, easing viewers into a potential change in style.

-For all that I dislike how the Timeless Child arc has been handled, it is really funny how the Child was forgotten and abandoned even in a meta sense.

-Something which I find quite interesting is the scene with the sentient pieces of cloth. The Doctor, being the Doctor, shields the others from the rags, luring them to her...and she says something quite interesting. She says that she has 'a dozen lifetimes' worth of fear for them to feast on - on the face of it, this makes sense, as this is the Thirteenth Doctor, and she's only just started that life. Except, she isn't the thirteenth - the War Doctor and the Metacrisis Doctor still counted as the Doctor, meaning that Thirteen is actually the fifteenth incarnation of the Doctor. The Thirteenth Doctor's only just started her existence, so obviously she doesn't have many memories of fear; the Metacrisis Doctor split off from the others, so the original Doctor wouldn't have access to any of his memories following the split. But that still leaves one lifetime who, judging from the Doctor's statement, didn't experience fear - my money's on the War Doctor. Of course, it's more likely that the writers forgot that the Thirteenth Doctor is only numerically the thirteenth, while actually being the fifteenth.