A Must-Read Book: Hugo Cabret

I just finished up a book that I have to share with anyone who is interested in the merging worlds of novels, graphic novels, photographs and tangled (but resolved) plot lines. The book is called The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.

I won’t give the story away, but it involves a young boy in Paris with a passion for clocks and mechanical objects, an automaton that can do something wonderful, a passion for the power of movies in our lives, and how fragile but powerful the connections are between people.

Here is a blurb from the introduction, just to set the stage:

“…before you turn the page, I want you to picture yourself sitting in darkness, like the beginning of a movie. On screen, the sun will soon rise, and you will find yourself zooming towards a train station in the middle of the city. You will rush through the doors into a crowded lobby. 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.”

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

I heard about the book from somewhere in my Bloglines aggregator and ordered it from Amazon (here is the link to order), thinking it would be a slim graphic novel. So I was quite surprised to find one of the fattest books I’ve seen in some time (500-plus pages) but is a combination of various genres and I read the entire thing in two days.

Now I wish I could order a class set for my students, but we don’t have the budget for that. Sigh. And, man, I just checked out the author’s flash site — very cool.
Peace (with gears fitting together like the reels of a film),
Kevin

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