The Exciting Narrative Puzzle of Brian Selznick’s The Marvels

With his new book, The Marvels, Brian Selznick is back with his signature style, weaving pictures and words together to tell a remarkable story about…well…stories: how we shape them; how we live inside and outside of them; and how they can save us. He does this in his typical jaw-droppingly inventive form, using a series of pencil-scratch drawings mixed with prose.
In Selznick’s Caldecott Medal-winning novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, he used alternating pictures and words to tell one story. In its follow up, Wonderstruck, he told one story in pictures, the other in words, and wove them together. Here in The Marvels, we get a more complex and impressive narrative puzzle. It’s the combination of a nearly 400 page story in drawings, followed by an independent story in words, that, with a little detective work, comes together in pictures again.

The illustrated portion begins by telling the story of a shipwreck in 1766. Billy Marvel, the disaster’s sole survivor, finds himself working at the Royal Theater in London. His story sparks a nearly 150 year-long tale of the Marvels, a family of artists and actors, who wow the London stage generation after generation.
Told only in pictures, their story first feels like a beautiful, massive flip-book that unfurls into a winding epic. Reading like a film, the drawings “zoom-in” on emotional closeups, and back away to reveal settings and scenes in perpetual motion. There are also visual patterns in this ambitious account: a dog, the weathervane of a ship, a reappearing angel, and a raging fire.
These patterns later inform the next story. This one, told only in words, takes place in 1990 and follows a misunderstood runaway, Joseph Jervis, who knocks at his Uncle Albert Nightingale’s door in London and finds himself in a spectacular—if strange—home, that feels like he’s gone back in time.

To avoid the wrath of his snooty, disinterested parents who sent him away to boarding school, Joseph tries to get his uncle to let him stay in this mysterious and enchanting home. But he also begins to question the house and its noises, decorations, and eccentricities. He wants to understand what it might have to do with his unknown family history.
Slowly, the visual patterns we came to know in the first story pop up again in Joseph’s story. Along with Joseph, the reader works to uncover how all the elements connect. And the conclusion is as playful, moving, and beautiful as the unique storytelling itself.
Just like the network of characters in the bustling train station of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the cast in The Marvels is just as much fun to read about. Beyond the Marvels themselves, there’s Frankie, Joseph’s curious, if trouble-making, neighbor. There’s the wise Florent, Uncle Albert’s friendly driver, as well as one of my favorite characters, Blink, whom we never meet, but hear about through flashbacks. Not to mention the eccentric Albert Nightingale, who is inspired by a real life collector and artistic genius whom Selznick discusses in detail in the author’s note.
From these real-life stories that we later learn inspired the book, to the many tales Selznick weaves together, The Marvels is layer upon layer of a seamlessly exciting story. Paging through the drawings and words is a true adventure, and readers of any age will want to devour this marvel of a book.