Wonder
Wonder
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
R. J. Palacio on Wonder
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
One afternoon outside an ice cream shopThe book began with a failure of nerve. She was outside an ice cream shop with her two sons when her younger son saw a little girl with a severe craniofacial difference and started to cry. She pushed the stroller away quickly, tried to exit the situation, and made everything worse. Driving home, she kept rehearsing what she should have done instead.
What I should have done, instead of trying to avoid the situation, was engage the girl and her mother in conversation. If my son cried, so be it: kids cry. But I should have set a better example for him, and shown him there was nothing to fear. Instead I panicked. I simply didn’t have the wherewithal to know what to do in that situation.
The arithmetic of daily exposure was what stayed with her longest. She kept calculating what repeated encounters like that one would cost the girl and her family every single day, and the number was staggering. That night, Natalie Merchant’s song “Wonder” came on the radio, and the book arrived whole.
The book kind of wrote itself in my head on that drive home. I would write the story from the child’s point of view. It would help people understand — not pity. I’m just like you, the child would say. I’m an ordinary kid — except for this one thing. And I would call the book Wonder because this child is a wonder.
randomactsofreading.wordpress.com, “Wonder Author R. J. Palacio Joins Us | Random Acts of Reading”She had spent more than two decades in publishing, designing covers for writers like Paul Auster and Salman Rushdie, and she submitted the manuscript under a pen name to keep those two lives separate. The book she imagined making was nothing like the projects she’d spent her career on.
I really had just set out to write a little book — a quiet, simple book. There are no vampires or wizards. It’s really just a book about kindness: the impact of kindness, the choice to be kind.
The gap between that modest ambition and what the book became is something she has never fully reconciled. On the TODAY show, asked about its reception, she said she had sometimes doubted it would even find a publisher: “It’s all been one surprise after another.” [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Midnight sessions and a structure that found itselfShe was working full-time in publishing and raising two boys when she wrote the book, which left no daylight hours free. The schedule she found was extreme by any ordinary measure, but she describes it as something other than a sacrifice.
My routine when writing Wonder was this: I would come home from work, have dinner with my family, help with some homework, watch some TV — usually fall asleep around ten — and then wake up around midnight and write for two to three hours when everyone was asleep. It sounds hard but it really wasn’t. I was so into the story and the characters I couldn’t wait to get back to them.
randomactsofreading.wordpress.com, “Wonder Author R. J. Palacio Joins Us | Random Acts of Reading”The book’s most distinctive structural feature, its rotation through six different narrators, was not designed in advance. She began with Auggie’s voice alone. The other perspectives accumulated one by one as her curiosity about the people around him outgrew what his chapters could supply.
I didn’t start out with the intention of going into the other voices, but it seemed like a natural transition as I was writing. There came a point where I was just so intrigued by Via that I wanted to hear directly from her. And Summer and Jack and the others. So no, it wasn’t that hard to get into their voices because it was a natural curiosity that led me to them, and then they led me through the story.
randomactsofreading.wordpress.com, “Wonder Author R. J. Palacio Joins Us | Random Acts of Reading”Keeping parents and teachers out of the narration entirely was a deliberate act of restraint. Adult voices would have pulled the story toward a different set of questions about systems, diagnoses, and institutional responses. She wanted the scale to stay small.
I wanted to keep this in the realm of kids. If we had heard from the parents, I think the story would have taken a different arc. It would have widened the storyline, and I wanted to keep it simple. One year in the life of this extraordinary boy and his loving family.
Writing for a young audience raised a question she had a firm answer to. Her two decades designing books had shown her how quickly readers sense condescension, and she refused to let age become an excuse to simplify ideas. The one concession she made was to the physical rhythm of how children read.
A good story is a good story. I think one of the worst things a writer can do is write down to a certain age group. And certainly I tried not ever to do that with Wonder. Maybe the only thing I did when keeping my target audience in mind was writing shorter sentences than I might usually express myself as a writer.
The personal thread
The teacher she never forgotMr. Browne, the English teacher whose monthly precepts thread through the book, is not entirely invented. His habit of handing students a guiding moral sentence each month came from Palacio’s own practice of collecting sayings, which she had started doing at thirteen or fourteen. The character’s physical description and spirit come from someone real.
I had a wonderful English teacher named Mr. Browne in high school, and though he never taught us precepts, he’s the kind of teacher who would have. He was very tall and had a blond beard. The Mr. Browne in the book is my nod to Mr. Browne in my high school. I hope he’s reading this.
Her honesty about what she would have done as a child gives the book’s moral argument its credibility. She doesn’t position herself as someone who already knew how to be kind. She identifies with the character most critics read as the novel’s study in insufficient decency.
If a kid like Auggie had come into my class when I was in the 5th grade, I think I would have been most like Charlotte: nice enough, never mean, but never really extending myself, either.
What she wants us to sit with
The choice, not the feelingThe message she most wants young readers to carry out of the book is not about Auggie’s suffering but about the weight of ordinary decisions. She frames it as a question of visibility: every small choice registers somewhere, even when the person making it believes no one is watching.
I hope that kids will come away with the idea that they are noticed: their actions are noted. Maybe not immediately or directly or even in a way that seems obvious, but if they’re mean, someone suffers. If they’re kind, someone benefits. And the choice is theirs: whether to be noticed for being kind or for being mean. They get to choose who they want to be in this world.
She is specific about what readers are responding to emotionally, and her account of it pushes against the assumption that the book’s power comes from Auggie’s condition. What moves people, she argues, is a pattern they rarely see confirmed.
I love that they’re getting that this really isn’t just a book about a kid with a facial anomaly: it’s a celebration of kindness. The impact of kindness. I think that’s why people are so moved by parts of the book. We like to see people doing good, rising beyond our expectations to do something noble. It’s not the big heroic gestures but the small moments of kindness that shape the world.
Charlotte, a minor character who is polite to Auggie but never risks anything socially on his behalf, is the figure Palacio returns to most when explaining what the book is actually teaching. Charlotte occupies the position most readers secretly recognize in themselves.
Charlotte represents the difference between simply being nice, and choosing to be kind, which is a main theme of the book. She’s the classic bystander, though I think by the end of the book she’s become aware of this. I think in the sixth grade, she’ll be an upstander, not a bystander.
For parents, her message drops any gentleness. She is arguing against a cultural habit of treating middle-school cruelty as developmental weather, something to wait out rather than refuse.
I hope they’re reminded to keep that bar of expectations raised high for their kids. Don’t buy into that nonsense that ‘all kids go through a mean phase’ in middle school. That’s absurd. We’re so accustomed to a level of meanness passing for normal that we’ve just come to accept it. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The scene she returns to most in interviews makes the same argument in miniature. After older boys attack Auggie and his friend Jack at a school retreat, classmates who had avoided Auggie all year step in. When it is over, Auggie raises his hand for a high-five not knowing whether anyone will meet it. That they do is, for her, the scene that carries everything the book is trying to say about what courage and kindness actually look like when they arrive not as grand gestures but as a single outstretched hand.