Early in Wonderland, reporter Michael Bamberger nails the enduring appeal of high-school stories by describing high school as "adult life in concentrated form." Since late adolescence is, as Bamberger puts it elsewhere, a time when "you're old enough to see a real glimpse of your adult self, but young enough to dream," grown-ups and kids alike are drawn to fictional and non-fictional depictions of that time, to see what might have happened, and what might happen yet.
For Wonderland, Bamberger spent a full school year at Pennsbury High School in a working-class suburb outside Philadelphia. Pennsbury is famous for its senior prom—an old-fashioned affair still held in the school gym and overseen by the community at large—and though Bamberger separates Wonderland into month-by-month chapters, his focus is always on the big dance. He covers a handful of students in depth, including the starting quarterback, the prom-committee chairman, the junior-class president, and a young couple about to be parents, and he traces their roots and their plans for the future, which generally center on the prom first and college second.
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. But he spends more time than he might have talking to the teachers, administrators, and parents, which gives Wonderland a necessary sense of scope. The adults remember their own high-school years (at Pennsbury, in many cases), and it's moving to see how hopeful the authority figures are, as they work to give their kids a few memorable experiences before the real world encroaches.
Bamberger records all of this with a light dramatic touch. Two of his subjects get seriously ill, another dies unexpectedly, a few have conflicts with the faculty, and others experience sudden surges in popularity, but Bamberger tells all their stories with the same detail-oriented style, instilling the mundane with mystery. The book's title and its main story arc have to do with the school's attempt to get rock troubadour John Mayer to play at the prom—an endeavor that makes Mayer and everyone involved with him look pretty shabby—but Wonderland is really about how teenagers can be simultanously iconic and complex. High school remains fascinating because those who go through it eventually learn that no one they knew then was who they seemed to be, including themselves.