The Really Popular Book Club: Wonder with Lottie Mills

Tue 20 April 2021

The Really Popular Book Club is the new reading group hosted by Cambridge University Library. Everyone is invited to join us and our special guests to discuss a really popular book, one that we all know and perhaps or perhaps not love.

Join us for this club meeting where we will be discussing Wonder by R. J. Palacio, a 2012 children’s novel and NY Times Bestseller. Wonder follows August, a ten-year-old boy with substantial craniofacial abnormalities, as he begins attending mainstream school for the first time. His adventures, narrated not only in his own words, but by his peers and family, tackle questions of physical disability and what it means to be different.

Our special guest for the evening will be Lottie Mills, second-year English student at Newnham College and BBC Young Writer of the Year 2020. Wonder has particular personal significance to Lottie, as she explains: ‘I first read this book when I was ten years old – August’s age – and it felt deeply thrilling to see my own experiences of disability and being different right there on the page. As an adult, my feelings on disability representation have developed, and become more nuanced – but I still have a tremendous fondness for this novel, and think it is a really fitting gateway into the wider conversation of disability in fiction.’

As well as hearing from Lottie about her thoughts and observations on Wonder, we will once again be opening the floor up to you, our club members, to share your own observations and remarks. To get you thinking and to help prepare any comments or questions you might want to share, we have prepared three starter questions:

1. August’s disability is the central focus of Wonder – how did you feel about the way the book addresses this topic?
2. How does the use of multiple narrators influence the story as a whole?
3. Wonder is primarily a book aimed at children; would you say there are any ‘double-level’ elements which would appeal more to adults?

Further information about The Really Popular Book Club, including our FAQs, can be found here: https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/whats/events/really-popular-book-club.

Cost: Free