We begin with Billy, who is the lone survivor of a terrible shipwreck and finds a new home and community in the newly-built Royal Theatre, and end with Leo, who isn’t sure he wants to follow his family’s legacy of life in the theater. It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that the illustrations in the first section of the book are breathtaking and affecting as we follow generations of the Marvel family. Selznick unfurls the relationship between these two stories gradually, in a way that both manages to build suspense in a maddening way and be totally satisfying once all is revealed. Rather than having images and text interspersed, The Marvels’ first 400 pages are told through illustration, chronicling the exploits of sailing-turned-acting family the Marvels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the last 200 pages told in prose, following the story of 13-year-old Joseph Jervis after he runs away from boarding school to stay with his eccentric uncle, Albert Nightingale. Selznick’s storytelling technique – not quite graphic novel or picture book, but dependent upon its illustrations nonetheless – combines images and text in new and exciting ways, and readers thrilled by this technique in Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck won’t be disappointed by Selznick’s latest offering, The Marvels. Although Brian Selznick has been writing and illustrating children’s books since 1991, it was the release of The Invention of Hugo Cabret in 2007 that truly catapulted him to superstar status within the children’s literary community.
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