The book Wonder by R.J. Palacio is about a kid named Auggie Pullman who has always been different. Ever since he was born he has had a craniofacial abnormality, which makes his face different than most of ours. He has had many surgeries to try and make his problem go away. Some have helped and some have not.

This book really tells us how fortunate we are. Auggie, who gets treated differently just because of what he looks like, but still has a smile on his face sometimes more than we do. This book reminds us how fortunate we are with our own lives.

Auggie has to deal with a lot of things throughout the book. His parents decide to enroll him into the fifth grade at Beecher Prep, the first time he has been to a public school. Before the official school year starts, he takes a tour led by a few other students. Touring the school, Auggie thinks he has found a friend, Jack Will, who was one of the tour guides.

On the first day of school, he gets a lot of weird looks and questions about his disorder. Some of the kids call him names telling him he’s a freak, monster, or even a rat boy. Nobody should ever be called names, especially not names like that. Auggie starts to get trapped in a trapdoor of depression, until he meets a new friend named Summer who doesn’t care about Auggie’s disorder. They sit together at lunch and act like normal people just having normal conversations. Auggie also becomes best friends with Jack Will, like they are just two normal kids.
Not everything is good at school however, Julian, one of his classmates says mean stuff about him and the students start something called the plague where if you touch Auggie you suddenly get the plague. My heart dropped when I heard that the kids started that because I knew some of the kids still were caught off guard by his face but I didn’t realized that the kids can be that mean.

Things start to get better later in the book however. Auggie and the rest of the class go on a three day two night trip to a campground. Before this trip, Auggie has never slept anywhere away from home. This isn’t the big part though. When Auggie and Jack Will decided to go to the bathroom in the woods because the line is too long at the regular restrooms. They start to hear some crackling and popping of the sticks behind them. They encounter a few seventh grade boys from a different school. They start to make fun of both Jack Will and August until Amos, Henry, and another one of Auggie’s classmates sneak up on the seventh graders and take them down. They get into a fight and August loses his hearing aid. This was a big part to me because this showed that not just Jack Will, Summer, and his family have August’s back.

At the very end of the book, it was heartwarming to find out that Auggie won one of the school awards. Earlier in the book Auggie quotes “Everyone deserves a standing ovation because we all overcometh the world.” Well at the end of the book, when Auggie stood up to go receive his award, he got the standing ovation that everyone deserves.