The Invention of Hugo Cabret - Brian Selznick
... this is Hugo Cabret. His head is full of secrets, and he's waiting for his story to begin.
This is the first book I've finished since our move to Tribune. I've been busy unpacking, setting up the house, hanging pictures, and figuring out my new iMac, and just haven't gotten back into the reading habit. I did, however, unpack all our books (including a bunch we bought at a book sale just before leaving Portland) and I've got my library card already, so hopefully I'll pick up the pace pretty soon here.
This one's a very quick read because over half of it is illustrations, and many of the pages of text have enormous margins. It's a different experience because it's not quite like reading a picture book, not like a comic, and not exactly like a regular kids' book. It's a little more like watching a silent movie only with really long text slides.
Hugo Cabret is a young boy living in a Paris train station, winding up the clocks and stealing to eat. He also has a notebook with drawings of a mysterious automaton. Pretty soon his life gets tangled up with that of the old man who runs the toy booth at the station. It's set in the 1930s and has to do with magic, movies, and machinery, in a clever story that pulls in real events and photographs.
There's so little writing so there's not so much for me to really evaluate, but it was a quick, enjoyable read. The pencil illustrations are great at setting a mood and following the characters around, but I didn't find myself spending much time poring over them, either.
Fed to jonathan's brain | September 11, 2007
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