Pennsbury High School would be like any other were it not for one thing: its prom. Its spring dance is considered by Readers Digest to be one of Americas best legacies. Wonderland is the true story of a dance floor and the kids who fill it: a tale of hope, sex, love, and loss.
Critic Reviews
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Outstanding
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Atlantic Monthly Tom Carson
Wonderland isn't just an uncommonly rich and intimate look at high school life; it's the best piece of decent-minded, unpatronizing Americana I've read since Jim Wilson's Vietnam-themed "The Sons of Bardstown."
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Favorable
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Booklist Vanessa Bush
Teens will find this fascinating, fanny, and dead-on, whether they love or hate prom. [1 June 2004, p.1674]
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Adam B. Very
Deeply affecting.
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Favorable
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Kirkus Reviews
[Bamberger] tenderly delivers a frazzled, appealing group of kids, proving once again that no examined life is ordinary.
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Favorable
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Publishers Weekly
Bamberger's teens may not be 100% typical, but they offer a good window onto at least a segment of contemporary teen culture.
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Rachel Elson
Bamberger's carefully drawn portraits seem strangely optimistic nonetheless. Perhaps, he appears to suggest, students who can construct such a virtual world for themselves are indeed capable of reshaping their own lives to match their dreams.
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Mark Oppenheimer
The prom is a thin conceit, one that Bamberger's fine book might have done without. When the big night finally arrives, it is just one night in the lives of some unspectacular people, and the author knows it. His pleasure in writing Wonderland seems to be, besides the nostalgic thrill, the reportorial challenge, getting deep, way deep, inside ordinary people's lives. [28 Aug 2005, p.R5]
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Mixed
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The New Yorker
Although Bamberger means to present a microcosm of contemporary middle-class America, his weakness for quaint traditions results in a book that feels more nostalgic than up to date.
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Mixed
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The Onion A.V. Club Noel Murray
The weakest aspect of Wonderland, aside from the lack of pictures of its subjects, is Bamberger's curtailed cross-section of student life: Most of the kids he follows are middle-class and reasonably established in Pennsbury's social order. The author doesn't have much to say about the outcasts, in any of their myriad forms.
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