One Potato Review

Ambivalent but true. Victor, the wild child, was captured – or he was rescued – in the Aveyron district of Southern France in 1800, and his assimilation was an arduous, eventful, and not altogether successful experiment. This luminous account finally asks more questions than it answers (“I wonder what he sees…I wonder what he feels. I wonder….” thinks the doctor who is treating him), and it’s all the more surprising for its incomprehension, no matter how many times you have reached the final page. A great neglected history by the author and illustrator Mordecai Gerstein (The Man Who Walked Between the Towers) who is at his best elaborating – and sometimes debunking – such legends.