wonder book review worksheet

Wonder – Book Review and Teaching Resources

Teacher/Parent Resources , Book Reviews , Children's Lit , Educational Websites , Homeschooling Resources , Lessons , Printables , Reviews | 4 comments

January 19, 2014

Synapsis of Wonder :

August Pullman was born with a facial deformity that, up until now, has prevented him from going to a mainstream school. Starting 5th grade at Beecher Prep, above all, he wants nothing more than to be treated as an ordinary kid—but his new classmates can’t get past Auggie’s extraordinary face. WONDER , now a #1  New York Times  bestseller and included on the Texas Bluebonnet Award master list, begins from Auggie’s point of view, but soon switches to include his classmates, his sister, her boyfriend, and others. Subsequently, these perspectives converge in a portrait of one community’s struggle with empathy, compassion, and acceptance.

Wonder , by  R. J. Palacio , was one of the best, most touching books I have read in a long time. In truth, I could not help but fall in love with Auggie from the very first page, and I am sure other readers did the same. Moreover, stepping into his shoes was eye opening, and you could not help but root for Auggie to succeed. Further, I especially loved the fact that the author included perspectives of several other characters as well; she did this by having certain chapters be from the point of view of one specific character. Additionally, seeing how Auggie was perceived by his sister, friends, and others allows the reader to see all sides of the story, and to empathize not only with Auggie but with those people who interact with him on a daily basis.

Finally, seeing the entire picture truly allows the reader to grasp the difficult lessons presented, and to subsequently fall in love with the book as I did. For all these reasons, I would highly recommend this book to both children and adults.

I choose kind, do you?

Correspondingly, for those wanting to incorporate this wonderful story into the classroom or home-based lessons, here are some great resources to get you started:

Lessons/Teaching Resources

• Fabulous questions for teachers from R.J. Palacio’s Site
• Awesome collection of teaching resources from Mr. W’s Updates.
• Frequently-asked questions about the book answered by R.J. Palacio
• More from the author:  Things you might be wondering about, in no special order…
• Choose Kind – Great resources to help parents and teachers preach R.J. Palacio’s message
• Nice collection of resources from DRMS Library Media Center
• Collection of resources from the Children’s Craniofacial Association
• WONDER by R.L.Palacio (Teacher & Student Resources) – Scoop.it! Community Board of Resources
• Reminds Us That Kindness Makes the World Go Round
• Kids’ Wings – large collection of resources 
• Article from NPR:  What It’s Like To Have Kids Stare At You?
• Bulletin Board Idea/Word Clouds
• Time for Kids Article:  Author R.J. Palacio talks to TFK about her highly praised book
• Photo – Character Traits Anchor Chart
• Discussion and Educator Guide from Random House – Amazing printable resource!
• Teaching with Trudy Ludwig
• A Novel Study , by R.J. Palacio ($$)
• Vocabulary Pack ($$)
• Cooperative Learning Activities   ($$)
• FREE Printable Bookmarks from Concepts for Teachers – super cute!

Since the release of Wonder, even more stories with these amazing characters have been released! Presently, over 1 million people have read Wonder and have fallen in love with Auggie Pullman, an ordinary boy with an extraordinary face. Now readers will have a chance to hear from the book’s most controversial character—Julian.

From the very first day Auggie and Julian met in the pages of the #1 New York Times bestseller, it was clear they were never going to be friends, with Julian treating Auggie like he had the plague. And while Wonder told Auggie’s story through six different viewpoints, Julian’s perspective was never shared. As such, readers could only guess what he was thinking.

Until now.  The Julian Chapter  will finally reveal the bully’s side of the story. For example, why is Julian so unkind to Auggie? And does he have a chance for redemption? Indeed, these are questions that many readers have pondered since reading Wonder.

If you enjoyed Wonder you will also like these fabulous books (click any to see more information):

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Thanksgiving is a special time of the year when families come together to express gratitude and celebrate the blessings in their lives. It’s also a wonderful opportunity to engage children in fun and educational activities that will not only keep them entertained but also teach them important lessons about the holiday. In this ultimate guide to Thanksgiving activities for kids, we have explored various ways to make this Thanksgiving season memorable for students and children.

We began by highlighting the importance of Thanksgiving activities for kids. These activities offer a chance for children to learn about the history and significance of Thanksgiving, as well as develop important skills such as creativity, critical thinking, and teamwork. With a wide range of crafts, games, and educational resources, you can keep your children engaged and entertained throughout the holiday season.

We then delved into the fun and educational Thanksgiving crafts for kids. From creating handmade Thanksgiving cards to making adorable turkey decorations, these crafts not only provide an opportunity for kids to showcase their creativity but also serve as a wonderful way to bond with classmates and family members. The festive Thanksgiving games for kids were another highlight, offering exciting ways to keep children active and entertained during this festive time.

Additionally, we explored educational Thanksgiving activities for kids, which included lessons and digital teaching resources. These resources are designed to enrich children’s understanding of Thanksgiving by incorporating educational elements into their activities. We also provided Thanksgiving teaching ideas, such as printables and storytelling recommendations, to help you create a dynamic and engaging learning environment for your students and children.

Lastly, we discussed Spanish Thanksgiving teaching ideas, allowing children to explore the holiday from a multicultural perspective. By incorporating Spanish vocabulary and cultural elements into their activities, children can broaden their horizons and develop an appreciation for diversity. If you are interested in more Spanish activities, a great place to start is this post introducing Spanish colors with lots of info and freebies!

As you can see, there are countless ways to make Thanksgiving a memorable and educational experience for children. Check out the various lessons and Thanksgiving activities for kids now, and create lasting memories this Thanksgiving season!

This is a great collection of resources. Thank you!!

Thank you for checking them out! Enjoy!

My summer holiday is almost over and I look forward to start up with teaching again because I will read Wonder to my pupils and I know they will enjoy it as much as I did! Thank you so ver much!

WOW!! Thank you so much for finding all of these resources and sharing them – for free!! I really appreciate this collection of information. My students are LOVING this book and I’m constantly trying to find engaging ways to make it fit into the CCSS. Thanks

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Wonder Novel Study: Comprehension & Vocabulary Activities

R.J Palacio's novel Wonder is a favorite in classrooms because the author's message – choosing kindness – is such an important skill for students to learn. This book is perfect for a whole-class novel study or read-aloud for younger learners, or it can be used as a book club or literature circle text for upper elementary and early middle school.

This no-prep novel study for Wonder is a great way to build important reading comprehension skills and vocabulary with this fabulous story.

If you need a copy of the book, you can get Wonder in paperback on Amazon . (This link is an affiliate link. The book won't cost you any more, but I earn a small commission on your purchase that will be used to cover the costs associated with this website.)

What you'll find on this page:

Wonder Summary

This is the story of August Pullman, who's been homeschooled his entire life due to some medical issues related to his craniofacial abnormalities. When Auggie turns 10, his family begins to realize that he needs to be able to function in a world where people aren't always kind to those that look different. so they enroll him in school.

There are both ups and downs in this transition. As a fifth-grader at Beecher prep, Auggie finds friendship and faces bullies. His friends are ostracized just for associating with him, which makes things even tougher.

The whole thing comes to a head when the 5th graders head to nature camp. When Auggie and Jack are attacked by some 7th graders looking for trouble, a few boys from their class come to their rescue and a fight ensues. Auggie is hurt and scared in the scuffle, but he's also overwhelmed with emotion because the kids that have ignored him all this time stood up and protected him. The only question is…will these changes be permanent?

What reading level is Wonder ?

This book comes in at a whopping 320 pages. It is a Guided Reading Level V and has a Lexile score of 790L. Appropriate for fourth through sixth graders, the book is considered to be high-interest for students in grades 3-8.

What's included in this novel study unit?

This month-long Wonder novel study unit breaks this fabulous book into 20 sections. Each day's work includes both comprehension activities and vocabulary. There are four weeks worth of daily lesson objectives and paper-saving printables included in this resource.

Here's more about what you'll find inside this Wonder Novel Study:

• Instructional guide with daily comprehension skill, objective, and key Tier 2 & text-based vocabulary
• Comprehension trifolds (provided in color and black & white)
• Reader's notebook comprehension prompts (matching trifolds)
• Word of the Day text-based vocabulary flipbooks
• Vocabulary word wall cards
• Trifold answer keys for easy grading
• Enrichment Mini-Book with engaging projects & activities related to the text

Reading comprehension skills targeted

These novel study resources were purposefully selected to align with the details and plotline of Wonder . The materials were written to focus on reading comprehension skills that are often more difficult for struggling readers.

Some of the comprehension skills addressed in this novel study include:

• Making inferences
• Drawing conclusions
• Describing character change
• Analyzing characters & setting
• Identifying the main idea
• Point of view
• Context clues and vocabulary
• Using descriptive language
• Summarizing
• Utilizing text evidence

The daily lessons target one comprehension skill. This lets students focus on quality rather than quantity when it comes to responding to literature. Unlike many novel studies with lists of questions that require students to regurgitate the text, this format makes sure your students understand and can apply their knowledge to Wonder and other texts they read.

The novel study format

Comprehension prompts are provided in two formats, selected to reduce copies while still offering materials for student use.

Here's an overview of each of the comprehension response formats:

The trifold format was the original design for this novel study.

Each foldable was designed to cover a week worth of comprehension using only one piece of paper.

Students respond to a targeted question each day that focuses the day's reading on the comprehension skill.

From the student's perspective, the benefit of the trifold is that it is extremely approachable. Each day's work only takes up a third of the page, and this keeps reluctant writers from shutting down.

From the teacher's perspective, it easy to collect and grade. Many students use the trifold as a bookmark, helping prevent missing papers.

Learn more about the trifold format .

The Reader's Notebook prompts are perfect for advanced students, who provide a more in-depth analysis, and struggling writers, who may need more space to write their response.

For advanced readers, the notebook prompts can be used to generate a longer, more detailed response to the daily prompt. This pushes the students to analyze and defend their answers.

However, the notebook prompts are also great for students with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and fine motor issues because they can be glued onto specialized paper or within a notebook to give students with large handwriting more room to respond.

Regardless of the format selected, the prompt is the same so you can easily have some students working on the trifolds while others use the notebook prompts.

What academic vocabulary is included in this novel study?

There are over 50 academic vocabulary words included in the instructional guide for this novel. These include general academic vocabulary and skill-specific vocabulary.

It is crucial to teach academic vocabulary explicitly and within context. Struggling learners often lack the vocabulary essential to perform well in school and on standardized assessments, so this is an easy way to incorporate this into your regular instructional practices. Learn more about why academic vocabulary is important.

Here is a small sample of the academic vocabulary you'll find included in this novel study:

General vocabulary:

Skill-focused vocabulary:.

• point of view

Text-based vocabulary in Wonder

In addition to the Tier 2 vocabulary, each day's lesson includes a text-based vocabulary word that can be found within the day's reading. Some of the vocabulary words included in this literature guide are:

• attribution

These words can be taught using the included flipbook format. Designed with conserving copies in mind, the flipbooks require only a half-piece of paper per week.

The Word of the Day Flip Book is designed for use in interactive reading journals.

To use the flipbooks, cut around the outer edge, cut the tabs, and glue it into their notebook. Have students leave the flaps unglued so they can be lifted. This allows students to write under them.

Depending on your students, you can have them generate a definition of the day's word or generate a list of synonyms and antonyms. You can even have students draw a picture of the meaning.

How to purchase this Wonder Novel Study

This Wonder novel study unit can be purchased directly or from my Teachers Pay Teachers.

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Wonder: book review (B1)

Wonder is a book about an ordinary boy called Auggie who looks very different from most boys his age. 

Instructions

Do the preparation exercise first and then read the article. If you find it too easy, try the next level. If it's too difficult, try the lower level. After reading, do the exercises to check your understanding.

Preparation

What’s wonder about.

Wonder tells the story of August, a ten-year old boy who lives with his parents and sister in New York. August, or Auggie as his family call him, is an ordinary boy in many ways. He rides a bike and likes playing with his Xbox. But Auggie was born with deformities of the face and looks very different from other kids. At the start of the book, he tells us 'My name is August. I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse.' Auggie’s appearance shocks people. People look at him for a long time or sometimes they look away as soon as they see him.

Auggie’s had 27 operations on his face and has spent a lot of time in hospital. His mother has taught him at home, but now that he’s ten, she thinks he should go to school. At first, Auggie hates the idea of school and doesn’t want to go. He worries that other kids will look at him strangely or call him horrible names, but his parents persuade him to visit a school and meet the headteacher. After the visit, Auggie decides that, yes, he will go to school.

Like many kids, Auggie is really anxious on the first day. Because of his face, nobody wants to sit next to him and he notices other kids looking and talking about him behind their hands. Fortunately, he makes friends with Jack, a boy in his class, and Summer, a girl he chats with at lunch. But after surviving the first day, Auggie soon learns that his classmates are saying they will catch 'the plague' if they touch him. Wonder tells the story of Auggie’s first year at school and how other kids treat him. It’s a difficult year with good and bad times. But towards the end, a frightening and dramatic event at a school camp changes things completely.

Is it a good book?

Wonder is an excellent book that tells a moving and inspiring story. It’s fast-moving and gripping too. I found myself reading it on the bus even if I only had time to read a couple of pages. It appeals to all age groups and is very popular with teenagers and adults. Auggie is a very likeable central character. He’s got a good sense of humour, so the book is both funny and sad at times. It’s a fascinating story about a regular kid who’s living in a world that’s not used to people who look different.

One great thing about the book is that it’s told from the point of view of different characters. We begin with Auggie, but then the story is told by his sister, Via, and his schoolmates till we come back to Auggie at the end. This works really well as we find out what it’s like for Via to have a younger brother who takes a lot of her parents’ attention. We also learn how Jack is left out of the 'popular group' at school, just because he is Auggie’s friend.

A bestseller

Wonder is RJ Palacio’s first novel. On her website, she explains that the idea for the book came to her after seeing a girl with facial deformities on the street one day. Wonder has been a bestseller in the United States and has won several awards. Many schools are using it to start discussions about bullying, friendship and being different. A film version is being made, and many, including me, are looking forward to seeing what RJ Palacio writes next.

Robin Newton

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Check your vocabulary: gap fill, worksheets and downloads.

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Manic Street Teachers

Click on the image below to take you to the resource.

This is a totally FREE resource based on R.J. Palacio's book Wonder. 

FREE Wonder Book Study Guide

8 weeks worth of reading lessons

Fluency, retrieval, vocabulary and inference lessons

Lesson plans provided

Space Oddity skills-based reading comprehensions and assessment

All 47 pages for FREE!

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Wonder Worksheets and Literature Unit

How to Teach Wonder by R.J. Palacio using Hands-On, Interactive Activities

Novel Studies that Promote Higher-Order Thinking

We all know how important novels are when helping students develop authentic literacy skills. However…we also know that traditional novel studies don’t allow students to implement all of the literacy skills necessary to become a well-rounded reader.

Traditional novel studies usually include a set of comprehension or discussion questions that correlate with each chapter. There also may be a vocabulary element included. These are important components of a novel study, but aren’t a holistic approach to reading.

Today, I am going to talk about a more hands-on approach to studying novels! Read on to find out how to use an interactive workbook to teach the novel,  Wonder!

Teaching Wonder

If you have read the novel, Wonder , by RJ Palacio…

Then, I can only assume that you fell in love with it like I did.

Wonder is the perfect novel to study in your intermediate classroom! This book covers themes of kindness, courage, family, identity and so much more. These thought-provoking ideas are present throughout this entire novel study .

As you read the novel, students will meet a young boy name August (Auggie) Pullman. Auggie just wants to be “normal,” but Auggie isn’t normal. He is extraordinary. Although, not everyone sees it this way.

From the very first page of Wonder , you and your students will be facing topics that are incredibly important to discuss. The Wonder Workbook is the perfect match for this.

A simple way to incorporate these topics is with a daily bell ringer. Each daily prompt has students think and respond about ideals that are woven through the text. This section of the workbook is one of my favorites to use as a class discussion guide, as it will encourage students to look at their stance or position on certain topics.

Digging Deep with the  Wonder Workbook

As I previously mentioned, this workbook includes SO MUCH MORE than comprehension questions and vocabulary. But, it does include that, too! The workbook has been designed to meet each level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Students will be able to really dig deep into understanding the novel with activities under each of the following sections: Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate and Create. Below are *some* of the ideas to incorporate from each section of the Wonder Workbook !

Remember: This is where you will find comprehension questions for each chapter! Students can work through these independently, as partners or groups, or they can be used as a guide for discussion.

Understand: Have students dive into the plot! Use the Extended Plot Structure activity to activate students’ literacy skills!

Apply: Study the characters’ physical, mental and emotional characteristics. Break down Auggie, Via, Jack Will, Summer, Miranda and Julian with the Characterization Flipbook!

Analyze: Use the complexity wheel to drive discussion of the novel. Or have students use their own creativity to complete task cards tied to the story! They could create illustrations, music, comics, poetry, tweets, etc!

Evaluate:  Think like a novelist! Pull back the layers of the story with the literary elements focus lesson or the identifying themes activity.

Create: Start a Kindness Campaign with the extension activity! Or one of my personal favorites: have students create their own Wonder Self-Portraits so that they can practice self-love and reflection!

The activities and lessons that come with this novel study will provide students with an interactive, hands-on approach to reading. They will be reading, writing, illustrating, creating, speaking, researching, discussing and so, so much more!

If you think your students are ready to really study a novel, give Wonder a try! If you’d like to see more from my  Wonder Workbook, click here !

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Wonder Book vs Wonder Movie Critic Worksheet

What educators are saying

Description.

Your students are already critical. Why not put that to good use? This worksheet has students ascribe a Star Rating to the book and to the movie with a short rationale, compare and contrast a character from the book to the movie, and write a letter to the author or director offering suggestions for improvement.

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Comparing Wonder : Book and Film

In this activity, activity overview, template and class instructions, more storyboard that activities, this activity is part of many teacher guides.

A compare and contrast worksheet helps students analyze the differences/similarities of two separate ideas, people, events, places, etc. It can help students list the evidence for both sides of their topics, and weigh the merits of each. For this activity, students will identify and record differences and similarities between the book and the movie Wonder . Teachers can modify the worksheets to guide students through each text, and scaffold as needed! They can be completed digitally or printed out and used to take notes while reading/watching.

For additional templates to customize for this example, check out our compare and contrast worksheet templates !

(These instructions are completely customizable. After clicking "Copy Activity", update the instructions on the Edit Tab of the assignment.)

Objective: Identify and record similarities and differences between the book and movie version of Wonder .

Student Instructions:

• Click on “Start Assignment”.
• As you are watching the movie, or after you have watched the movie, record similarities and differences that you find in the book and the movie.

Lesson Plan Reference

Grade Level 6-8

Difficulty Level 2 (Reinforcing / Developing)

Type of Assignment Individual

Type of Activity: Compare and Contrast with T-Charts

• [ELA-Literacy/RL/7/1] Cite several pieces of textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text
• [ELA-Literacy/RL/7/7] Compare and contrast a written story, drama, or poem to its audio, filmed, staged, or multimedia version, analyzing the effects of techniques unique to each medium (e.g., lighting, sound, color, or camera focus and angles in a film)

(You can also create your own on Quick Rubric .)

How To Use Movies to Inspire Learning

Read a book with your class.

Using movies to inspire learning is perfect for a language arts class. In general, it is a good idea to read the book first and help students to understand the main ideas through the plot and characters.

Watch the Movie

Instruct students to watch the movie version of the book, paying careful attention to similarities and differences that they find. Learning how to organize their thoughts into comparing and contrasting is a higher level skill all students need.

Find Similarities and Differences

Instruct students to find similarities and differences between the book and the movie. They may look at elements such as characters, setting, themes, conflicts, and other interactions in the story line. Classifying elements of the book and movie will help them to organize information.

Frequently Asked Questions about Comparing Wonder: Book and Film

Why is comparing and contrasting an important skill for students.

Students will always need to be able to judge between two different elements and find out how they are different and how they are similar. This helps them to categorize their world beyond literature, and is a lifelong skill.

How can a movie aid in learning?

Students can use movies for an interesting lesson in comparing and contrasting when they compare the actions, characters, and themes of a book and a movie. There are so many lessons to learn about director's choices, how the similarities and differences play out, and how the words on a page can come alive.

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Download these free printable Wonder activity sheets and help choose kind

by Caroline Siegrist | Feb 15, 2018 | DIY | 4 comments

We’re all huge fans of RJ Palacio’s Wonder and the 2017 Wonder movie that the book inspired. Fans as in, we all sobbed into our popcorn bowls and loved every minute.  So I was psyched to discover these  free printable Wonder-themed activity sheets  (PDF) that bring the themes of the book to life, helping kids cultivate kindness and self-confidence through fun exercises.

Because more kindness, please.

The free printables include a wordsearch, drawing exercises, and writing prompts, including a letter that kids can write to invite Auggie himself to join them in an after-school activity.

What would they like to do with him? And would it require an astronaut helmet or no?

Related: Wonderful gift ideas for Wonder book and movie fans. 

I think these printable Wonder activity sheets are perfect to share with your family, a classroom, or even your girl scout or boy scout troop — who have hopefully all read the book and seen the movie. Because if they loved the story as much as I did, they’ll definitely want to spend more time with Auggie.

Download the free printable Wonder activity sheets (PDF) and if you’re super fans, you can rent or purchase the Wonder Movie  digitally through our affiliate Amazon, or own the DVD that was released just this week.

Written by Caroline Siegrist

Caroline Siegrist is a brand new mom, a proud aunt of 5, and a writer and hospital chaplain based in Nashville. She has a fondness for children's literature, female-led indie rock bands, cooking international cuisine, and encouraging her nieces' and son's growing obsession with Star Wars. Bio Twitter Instagram

I am not seeing where to download the pdfs

Right click, copy link, then paste in a separate tab. Then, it worked for me. Not sure why clicking on it didn’t work.

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A Critic’s Plea for Maximalism: ‘Crack Us Open Like Eggs’

In her first essay collection, Becca Rothfeld demonstrates that sometimes, more really is more.

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ALL THINGS ARE TOO SMALL: Essays in Praise of Excess , by Becca Rothfeld

The essays I love favor abundance over economy, performance over persuasion. Zadie Smith’s exemplary “Speaking in Tongues” juggles Barack Obama, Shakespeare, Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” Pauline Kael on Cary Grant, Thomas Macaulay on the Marquess of Halifax and her own “silly posh” speaking voice. Its modest argument, that “flexibility of voice leads to a flexibility in all things,” disappears into the spectacle of a nimble mind reveling in its omnivorous erudition.

The critic Becca Rothfeld’s first collection, “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess,” is splendidly immodest in its neo-Romantic agenda — to tear down minimalism and puritanism in its many current varieties — but, like Smith, she makes her strongest case in her essays’ very form, a carnival of high-low allusion and analysis. Macaulay, Cary Grant, Obama and a posh accent? Rothfeld will see you and raise you: How about Simone Weil, Aristotle, “Troll 2,” Lionel Trilling, Hadewijch of Brabant (from whom she takes her title), serial killer procedurals, Proust and the Talmud? Not that she neglects Cary Grant; in an essay on love and equality, she filters a smart reading of “His Girl Friday” through the philosopher Stanley Cavell.

Cynthia Ozick (who ought to know) has favorably — and justly — compared Rothfeld to “the legendary New York intellectuals,” though Rothfeld lives in D.C., where she’s the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post. She’s also an editor at The Point, a contributing editor at The Boston Review, and has published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Atlantic, The Baffler and The British Journal of Aesthetics. Of course she also has a Substack, and she declares on her website — which links to many splendid pieces not collected in this book — that she’s “perhaps delusionally convinced” she’ll eventually finish her Harvard Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy.

The costive and the envious might wonder if she’s spreading herself too thin, but Rothfeld’s rigor and eloquence suggest that in her case, as the title of one essay has it, “More Is More.” That piece begins in dispraise of “professional declutterers” such as Marie Kondo, whose aesthetic amounts to “solipsism spatialized,” and from whose dream houses “evidence of habitation — and, in particular, evidence of the body, with its many leaky indecencies — has been eliminated.”

But it soon morphs into dispraise of minimalist prose and the “impoverished non-novels” of fashionable writers including Jenny Offill, Ottessa Moshfegh and Kate Zambreno, whose “anti-narratives are soothingly tractable, made up of sentences so short that they are often left to complete themselves.”

Rothfeld, by contrast, leaves no phrase unturned. Her maximalist prose abounds in alliteration — “I recommend bingeing to bursting,” she writes, exhorting us to “savor the slivers of salvation hidden in all that hideous hunger” — as well as such old-school locutions as “pray tell” and “cannot but be offensive.” If these mannerisms sit uneasily next to her f-worded celebrations of sexuality, the dissonance is deliberate, and the unease is a matter of principle.

In “Wherever You Go, You Could Leave,” a takedown of “mindfulness,” Rothfeld reports that when she “decided to live” after a suicide attempt in her first year of college, she rejected the soothing blankness of meditation and concluded that “perturbation is a small price to pay for the privilege of a point of view.”

Despite her disdain for “professional opinion-havers” — among them the columnist Christine Emba, lately also of The Washington Post — she doesn’t mind laying down the law. In the book’s longest essay, “Only Mercy: Sex After Consent,” Rothfeld taxes Emba, author of the best-selling “Rethinking Sex,” with an “appalling incomprehension of what good sex is like.”

So, pray tell. “We should choke, crawl, spank, spew, and above all, surrender furiously, until the sheer smack of sex becomes its own profuse excuse for being.” Some sexual encounters, she continues, “crack us open like eggs” and “we should not be willing to live without them.”

We-shoulding is an occupational hazard of opinion-having, but we need take these pronouncements no more — and no less — to heart than Rothfeld’s paradoxical admiration for both the “beatifically stylized” films of Éric Rohmer and the “magnificently demented” oeuvre of David Cronenberg. Do we agree or disagree with her that Sally Rooney’s novels are overpraised, and that Norman Rush’s “Mating” is really “one of the most perfect novels of the past half century”?

More to the point, do we agree that “the aesthetic resides in excess and aimlessness,” and that extravagance is “our human due”? I’d say no to the former and yes to the latter, but who cares? What counts in these essays is the exhilarating ride, not the sometimes-dodgy destination. William Blake wrote that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; Rothfeld might say that they’re one and the same. No argument there.

ALL THINGS ARE TOO SMALL : Essays in Praise of Excess | By Becca Rothfeld | Metropolitan Books | 287 pp. | $27.99

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