Joseph and a friend follow Albert, discover secret tapes and puzzle over mysterious inscriptions (“You either see it or you don’t,” a phrase that haunts them). Joseph becomes obsessed with uncovering the story of the Marvels, but Albert won’t discuss it. There’s a model of Billy’s ship a black-and-white photograph of a boy who could be Leo ghostly sounds. (Joseph’s parents are as distant and cold as Leo’s had been, and away on an extended cruise.) Joseph’s uncle turns out to be a strange, reclusive grump who dresses in 19th-century finery and lives in a house that seems frozen in time: lighted only by candles, filled with antiques and items that seem to have belonged to the Marvels. He too is escaping an unsatisfying life, fleeing from boarding school in the west of England to find his uncle Albert in London. Set over 200 years later, in 1990, the prose story concerns Joseph, another young runaway who could be Leo’s twin. After a dramatic twist, the illustrated story abruptly ends. Inspired by his ancestor Billy, Leo decides to seek his fortune at sea. Shunned, he seeks out his hermit grandfather, who regales him with his family’s history. Generations of Marvels are hailed as geniuses - until Billy’s great-great-grandson Leo, a boy with no passion for the theater, breaks the streak. Rescued and taken to London, Billy falls in with a troupe of stagehands and grows up behind the curtain operating ropes and rigging that echo the workings of his doomed ship.īilly’s descendants turn out to be brilliant actors.
He’s performing in a play for the crew when vicious weather sinks the vessel. It’s the year 1766, and young Billy Marvel is on an American whaling ship. The illustrations of “The Marvels” tell one story, and its prose passages tell another - but where “Wonderstruck” shuffled its narratives, in “The Marvels” they are juxtaposed like two books that happen to share a binding. Each black-and-white panel is a wide-format glory that spills across two pages, composed like stills from some lost epic of the silent era. Readers of Selznick’s most recent books, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” and “Wonderstruck,” will recognize the hybrid-novel composition, in which he mixes pages of prose with mostly textless, high-impact pencil drawings. At more than 600 pages, the girth of “The Marvels” might be intimidating, were not more than half those pages illustrations. The book revels in complication, echoes and mirrorings, and peeling back its layers makes for a rich and surprising reading experience.įirst, let’s address the elephant on the shelf. But Brian Selznick’s “The Marvels” takes them on and, like the best children’s literature, doesn’t shy away from complex answers.
What’s fiction made of? Do true stories “matter” more than invented ones? These are heady questions for any book to tackle, especially one aimed at young readers.
0 kommentar(er)
