Everyone seems to love this book all over the place - apparently for very convincing reasons, as it deals with what a deformed little boy has to go through in school when his new classmates are confronted with his face for the first time. This is a book about bullying, but also about hope, friendship and family. And it's a good book, featuring a believable and interesting protagonist you simply can't help but relate to. 
 August ,,Auggie" Pullman has been born with a cleft palate which left him with a facial deformation, influencing his hearing abilities and scaring a lot of the people he meets away. After being homeschooled for quite some years, at the age of ten, Auggie's parents finally decide to allow him to enter middle school - leading Auggie into the beginning of a new chapter in his life, a chapter in which he is going to be confronted with friendship and the darkest sides of bullying alike. Entering this novel, I didn't know that cleft palates occure in 1 to 2 per 1000 births in the developed world - the subject of the novel is certainly a very strong and important one, a subject people should be confronted with because, after all, there is still too much bullying in this world. 
 Palacio structured her book in a very interesting way by including the viewpoints of several characters. After allowing the reader to get used to Auggie's voice, we meet his sister Via, then one of Auggie's friends at school, Summer, afterwards another classmate called Jack, then Via's boyfriend and finally an old friend of Via, Miranda. All of them were characterized by unique voices ... a method I didn't approve of at all. Why does an author need to write entire chapters without capitalization and in fragmented sentences just to underline that the character doesn't seem to care about grammar and how to express oneself properly? It was annoying and a struggle to read, as were the Facebook chat messages between two characters, which mainly consisted of messages like ,,can we b frenz agen?" or ,,awsum!!!!" by characters who talk in their own point of view chapters sophisticated enough to appear capable of using the English language without butchering it. It is simply contradictory when the author writes about one character in his very own punctuation, but then writes inconsistently about the voices of others. 
 If you don't want to be spoiled about the ending, then please don't read the parts I marked as such. Don't say I didn't warn you. 
 (view spoiler)[The ending is happier than a novel with such a dark and depressing topic should be allowed to be. Reminiscent of successful movies like ,,Shawshank Redemption", this tale dealt with serious topics and then allowed the topic hope to take over the style of the story. But in comparison with Shawshank, ,,Wonder" didn't conclude on a bitter-sweet and realistic note, it simply cried out ,,Here is your happy ending!" and ,,Be happy about it!" I did care for Auggie and was happy to realize that in the ending he had his own touching and amazing moments. But it took away a lot of the realistic aspects from the beginning, because when does a story actually end on such a happy note in real life? Remember that this is simply my personal opinion, but I thought that a more subtile conclusion would have been more memorable. The way it was written, this simply appeared to be like another school drama, even in spite of all the serious topics which were attached in the beginning and the middle part. (hide spoiler)] 
 Some time after the release of Wonder, R.J. Palacio published another chapter with the point of view of Julian, one of the kids who bullied Auggie in school. Not even Goodreads seems to know how to deal with this story, as there is one edition of Wonder with more than 160,000 ratings (the one I am reviewing right now) and then another edition with 110,000 ratings which includes the ten pages from the Julian chapter. Until a few weeks ago, those two editions were combined in a single book, yet now they have been divided into two different books on GR - which is confusing as hell. (Edit: As of October 2016, the two editions are combined as one single edition again.) Anyway, I gave the other edition two stars because of the way Palacio tried (and for me, obviously, failed) to excuse bullying. (view spoiler)[Julian was revealed to have suffered from nightmares about scary faces in his childhood, which made him feel like Auggie is just another monster - thus his awful behavior towards him. I don't doubt that something like this might happen in real life, just as, after all, there is no excuse for bullying. It was the way Palacio sounded as if this was to redeem Julian's character which confused me and ultimately made me feel like having some negative experiences in one's childhood makes up for plaguing someone who isn't even responsible for the way he looks. (hide spoiler)] 
 This is a book loved by almost everyone, and they are all right. Believe them. I'm just this weird reader who almost never likes those books which have received all the attention in the universe. 
 Buddy Read with Anne. Click here for her review.