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. Albert Nightingale's strange, beautiful house, with its mysterious portraits and ghostly presences, captivates Joseph and leads him on a search for clues about the house, his family, and the past.A gripping adventure and an intriguing invitation to decipher how the two stories connect, The Marvels is a loving tribute to the power of story from an artist at the vanguard of creative innovation.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. There, his family flourishes for generations as brilliant actors until 1900, when young Leontes Marvel is banished from the stage.Nearly a century later, runaway Joseph Jervis seeks refuge with an uncle in London. After surviving a shipwreck, he finds work in a London theatre.

Don't miss Selznick's other novels in words and pictures, The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck, which together with The Marvels, form an extraordinary thematic trilogy!Ī breathtaking new voyage from Caldecott Medalist Brian Selznick.Two stand-alone stories-the first in nearly 400 pages of continuous pictures, the second in prose-create a beguiling narrative puzzle.The journey begins at sea in 1766, with a boy named Billy Marvel.

The Marvels by Brian Selznick