Review by New York Times Review
IN 1991, my wife and I wandered into Eeyore's Books for Children on the Upper West Side, looking to freshen the nightly round of bedtime stories. "The Houdini Box," by Brian Selznick, sat right by the cash register. Selznick was working at the store at the time, which helps explain the great placement. Yet his handsome picture book, with its rich language and engaging pencil drawings, was a real find. It told a story with unexpected emotional power: A boy obsessed with Harry Houdini actually meets his idol in Grand Central Terminal. He is enthralled, then disillusioned, then - years later - triumphantly makes the connection he had been yearning for all his life. The book presents deep mysteries, shattered dreams and dreams regained. Our children loved it, and so did we. In the years since, Selznick has become known more for his artwork than for his writing, illustrating books like "The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins," written by Barbara Kerley (which won a Caldecott Honor in 2002). But he still has stories of his own to tell, and now here's a big one: "The Invention of Hugo Cabret." It is wonderful. Take that overused word literally: "Hugo Cabret" evokes wonder. At more than 500 pages, its proportions seem Potteresque, yet it makes for quick reading because Selznick's amazing drawings take up most of the book. While they may lack the virtuosity of Chris Van Allsburg's work or David Wiesner's, their slight roughness gives them urgency. The result is a captivating work of fiction that young readers with a taste for complex plots and a touch of magic - think Harry H., not Harry P. - can love. This is much more than a graphic novel: it is more like a silent film on paper. The brief introduction states this explicitly: "I want you to picture yourself sitting in the darkness, like the beginning of a movie. ... You will eventually spot a boy amid the crowd, and he will start to move through the train station. Follow him, because this is Hugo Cabret. His head is full of secrets, and he's waiting for his story to begin." And then it does, opening with a tight shot of the moon. As you turn the pages, the frame widens, the moon makes its way across the sky over Paris in 1931 and the dawn breaks over a train station. The imagined camera zooms through the doors to take in the crowd, and there is Hugo. Disheveled but intent, he skulks through the station and slips behind a ventilation grate in a dark passage, giving a glimpse of the holes in the sole of his shoe. Hugo is 12, an orphan devoted to his father's trade, clockmaking. Before dying, his father had taken Hugo to a museum where he worked part time and showed him an astonishing thing: a clockwork man, moldering and broken in the attic. The automaton sat at a desk and held a pen; when he was repaired and wound up, it was clear, he would write something. The automaton is the sort of device magicians of earlier days made to amaze their audiences. They knew back then what Arthur C. Clarke would tell us: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The machines have a hold on Selznick too: the idea for the novel, he tells us in the acknowledgments, came after he read about the automata collected by Georges Méliès, the great silent filmmaker who created "A Trip to the Moon" in 1902. A museum neglected the machines and eventually threw them away. "I imagined a boy finding those machines in the garbage, and at that moment, Hugo and this story were born," he writes. The story takes Hugo through tragedy and isolation. His father dies in a fire at the museum, and the boy's drunken uncle, the timekeeper at a train station, takes him in. The uncle soon disappears, and Hugo is left on his own, stealing food to survive and keeping the station's clocks running so no one will notice his uncle is gone. Meanwhile, he retrieves the automaton from the wreckage of the museum and carries on his father's efforts. "Hugo had continued thinking about the note that it would eventually write. And the more he worked on the automaton, the more he came to believe something that he knew was completely crazy. Hugo felt sure that the note was going to answer all his questions and tell him what to do now that he was alone. The note was going to save his life." FOR the parts he needs, Hugo steals wind-up toys from an old toymaker who maintains a booth at the station. But when the old man, Georges, catches him, Hugo discovers he's not the only one with secrets. Georges's goddaughter, Isabelle, has the key to the intertwined mysteries - and the determination to help Hugo learn to trust others again. The story is full of twists and surprises, and it is especially touching for being based in part on the real-life troubles of Georges Méliès, who went from being a magician to a visionary filmmaker, then suffered reversals that left him working at a toy booth in a railway station ... Enough. Everybody hates the guy who gives away the ending. It's enough to say that "Hugo Cabret" sits at the nexus of magic and storytelling and film, and that Brian Selznick - who, perhaps not so coincidentally, has the Hollywood legend David O. Selznick in his family tree - shows us a little magic of his own. John Schwartz, a reporter at The Times, writes about science and technology.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
\rtf1\ansi\deff0Selznick's novel in words and pictures, an intriguing mystery set in 1930s Paris about an orphan, a salvaged clockwork invention, and a celebrated filmmaker, resuscitates an anemic genre\emdash the illustrated novel\emdash and takes it to a whole new level. The result is somewhat similar to a graphic novel, but experiencing its mix of silvery pencil drawings and narrative interludes is ultimately more akin to watching a silent film. Indeed, movies and the wonder they inspire, like seeing dreams in the middle of the day, are central to the story, and Selznick expresses an obvious passion for cinema in ways both visual (successive pictures, set against black frames as if projected on a darkened screen, mimic slow zooms and dramatic cuts) and thematic (the convoluted plot involves director Georges M\'e9li\'e8s, particularly his fanciful 1902 masterpiece, A Trip to the Moon0 .) This hybrid creation, which also includes movie stills and archival photographs, is surprising and often lovely, but the orphan's story is overshadowed by the book's artistic and historical concerns (the heady extent of which are revealed in concluding notes about Selznick's inspirations, from the Lumi\'e8re brothers to Fran\'e7ois Truffaut). Nonetheless, bookmaking this ambitious demands and deserves attention\emdash which it will surely receive from children attracted by a novel in which a complex narrative is equally advanced by things both read and seen. --Jennifer Mattson Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Here is a true masterpiece-an artful blending of narrative, illustration and cinematic technique, for a story as tantalizing as it is touching. Twelve-year-old orphan Hugo lives in the walls of a Paris train station at the turn of the 20th century, where he tends to the clocks and filches what he needs to survive. Hugo's recently deceased father, a clockmaker, worked in a museum where he discovered an automaton: a human-like figure seated at a desk, pen in hand, as if ready to deliver a message. After his father showed Hugo the robot, the boy became just as obsessed with getting the automaton to function as his father had been, and the man gave his son one of the notebooks he used to record the automaton's inner workings. The plot grows as intricate as the robot's gears and mechanisms: Hugo's father dies in a fire at the museum; Hugo winds up living in the train station, which brings him together with a mysterious toymaker who runs a booth there, and the boy reclaims the automaton, to which the toymaker also has a connection. To Selznick's credit, the coincidences all feel carefully orchestrated; epiphany after epiphany occurs before the book comes to its sumptuous, glorious end. Selznick hints at the toymaker's hidden identity (inspired by an actual historical figure in the film industry, Georges Melies) through impressive use of meticulous charcoal drawings that grow or shrink against black backdrops, in pages-long sequences. They display the same item in increasingly tight focus or pan across scenes the way a camera might. The plot ultimately has much to do with the history of the movies, and Selznick's genius lies in his expert use of such a visual style to spotlight the role of this highly visual media. A standout achievement. Ages 9-12. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 4-9-With characteristic intelligence, exquisite images, and a breathtaking design, Selznick shatters conventions related to the art of bookmaking in this magical mystery set in 1930s Paris. He employs wordless sequential pictures and distinct pages of text to let the cinematic story unfold, and the artwork, rendered in pencil and bordered in black, contains elements of a flip book, a graphic novel, and film. It opens with a small square depicting a full moon centered on a black spread. As readers flip the pages, the image grows and the moon recedes. A boy on the run slips through a grate to take refuge inside the walls of a train station-home for this orphaned, apprentice clock keeper. As Hugo seeks to accomplish his mission, his life intersects with a cantankerous toyshop owner and a feisty girl who won't be ignored. Each character possesses secrets and something of great value to the other. With deft foreshadowing, sensitively wrought characters, and heart-pounding suspense, the author engineers the elements of his complex plot: speeding trains, clocks, footsteps, dreams, and movies-especially those by Georges Melies, the French pioneer of science-fiction cinema. Movie stills are cleverly interspersed. Selznick's art ranges from evocative, shadowy spreads of Parisian streets to penetrating character close-ups. Leaving much to ponder about loss, time, family, and the creative impulse, the book closes with a waning moon, a diminishing square, and informative credits. This is a masterful narrative that readers can literally manipulate.-Wendy Lukehart, Washington DC Public Library (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
See review on pages 173-175. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
From Selznick's ever-generative mind comes a uniquely inventive story told in text, sequential art and period photographs and film. Orphaned Hugo survives secretly in a Parisian train station (circa 1930). Obsessed with reconstructing a broken automaton, Hugo is convinced that it will write a message from his father that will save his life. Caught stealing small mechanical repair parts from the station's toy shop, Hugo's life intersects with the elderly shop owner and his goddaughter, Isabelle. The children are drawn together in solving the linked mysteries of the automaton and the identity of the artist, illusionist and pioneer filmmaker, Georges Mli's, long believed dead. Discovering that Isabelle's godfather is Mli's, the two resurrect his films, his reputation and assure Hugo's future. Opening with cinematic immediacy, a series of drawings immerses readers in Hugo's mysterious world. Exquisitely chosen art sequences are sometimes stopped moments, sometimes moments of intense action and emotion. The book, an homage to early filmmakers as dreammakers, is elegantly designed to resemble the flickering experience of silent film melodramas. Fade to black and cue the applause! (notes, film credits) (Fiction. 9-12) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
