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Wonderland
A Year In The Life Of An American High School
by Michael Bamberger

5.1 based on 9 reviews read critic reviews how did we calculate this? based on 17 votes read user comments rate this book

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• Official Publisher Site

Pennsbury High School would be like any other were it not for one thing: its prom. Its spring dance is considered by Reader’s Digest to be one of “America’s 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.

Atlantic Monthly Press, 224 pages
05/01/2004
$23.00

ISBN: 0871139170

Nonfiction
Social Sciences

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

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."

Booklist Vanessa Bush

Teens will find this fascinating, fanny, and dead-on, whether they love or hate prom. [1 June 2004, p.1674]

Entertainment Weekly Adam B. Very

Deeply affecting.

Kirkus Reviews

[Bamberger] tenderly delivers a frazzled, appealing group of kids, proving once again that no examined life is ordinary.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

The average user rating for this book is 5.1 (out of 10) based on 17 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Kate McV gave it a2:
Well, considering this was my senior class, I didn't enjoy it. A lot of things were embeleshed, and people who hung out with a lot of the main characters were not mentioned, and others were glorified. Hands down, this was not a good book.

Katie M gave it a9:
Great book, great high school. A little exaggerated, but overall good story.

LAL gave it a3:
Although Bamberger’s book will take the reader down memory lane to reflect on their own high school experiences, one may find that the book does little more. That it has no introduction, no notes and no bibliographical references significantly weaken it as a substantive work of social science. In fact the flagrant lack of bibliographical references implies some degree of plagiarism. The website for the State Museum of Pennsylvania as well as the website for the Levitt Corporation has much of the same information found in Chapter Two regarding the town and homes built in Levittown. The reader must question why Bamberger does not cite any sources; even journalists use and cite sources. Via the omniscient perspective, one can only wonder how the author comes to know what he relates about the lives, thoughts, feelings and specific experiences of the students. While it does chronicle his year-long observations of several students from a working-class high school, one can hardly call it ethnography as there is no description of his methodology. It is difficult to tell whether the author projects his own ideas, feelings, and politics into this account, or whether his statements are, indeed, those of the students. Thus, the fact that Bamberger is a journalist rather than an academician should be taken into account. The book offers absolutely no concept of the academic quality or content of this, or any other high school, but does provide insight into the social context of the lives of the students attending an American high school located in working-class suburbia.

Cohen gave it a10:
I loved it, and it was required for school!

[Anonymous] gave it a2:
pennsbury highschool is not a wonderland.... I agree with the onion a.v. club's review... the book follows students well established in the school...but not students with real stories to tell...

[Anonymous] gave it a0:
very boring. rent the breakfast club DVD.

John M gave it a3:
Why do I not wonder why this guy turned into a jerk who represents everything bad in sports journalism.

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