“After Wonderstruck, I thought, ‘What will Brian do next?’ and I was so blown away when I saw the structure of this story,” she says. Tracy Mack, executive editor of Scholastic Press and Selznick’s longtime editor, praises the author for “taking everything he’s done before to new heights” in The Marvels. Hopefully, readers will recognize in the prose story things they’ve seen in the pictures hundreds of pages earlier.” As readers, we don’t know how the boy in the prose part fits into the whole story, but we do know a bit more than he does. “For me, that’s exciting – and I think it makes the story feel like it’s yours when you’re asked to do some work. “One of the things I enjoy when creating a story is the space that’s left in the narrative for the reader to piece together,” he remarks. “The challenge with The Marvels was to take it one step further, and figure out what new way the pictures could be used and could mean – and to come up with a whole new structure.”Īnd how do The Marvels’ dual stories connect? Selznick’s keeping that under wraps. “ Hugo came out of novels and picture books I’d done up to that point, and for Wonderstruck I used what I’d learned from Hugo,” he explains. Selznick, who has long been intrigued by the history of London theater and was drawn to the idea of creating a multi-generational story about an acting family, says that The Marvels also sprang from the lessons he learned from his earlier book projects. Scholastic Press will publish the novel on September 15 with a 350,000-copy first printing. The second story, told in words, centers on a boy in 1990 who runs away from school to his estranged uncle’s enigmatic London house, where he pieces together many mysteries.
Relayed exclusively through pictures, the first story opens in 1766 and follows five generations of a legendary family of actors, beginning with young Billy Marvel, the lone survivor of a shipwreck. After creatively meshing words and art in his Caldecott-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck, Brian Selznick presents a new take on his multi-dimensioned storytelling technique in The Marvels, which balances two stories.
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