R.J. Palacio's novel Wonder tells the story of August Pullman (Auggie), a ten-year-old boy with severe craniofacial deformities due to several colliding congenital birth defects. Auggie lives in Manhattan with his loving family and, over the course of the novel, must learn to navigate the outside world as he begins attending a traditional school for the very first time. Wonder was published in 2012 and was Palacio's first novel.
Palacio got the idea for writing Wonder when she had a similar experience to the one that Jack and Jack's brother, Jamie, had upon seeing August for the first time. Palacio brought her son to get ice cream one day and he began to cry when a girl with facial...