The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a wonderful book about a young boy who lives in a Paris train station. Hugo Cabret is twelve years old when this story is told, yet he seems much older. His father died a while back and Hugo went to live with his uncle, the timekeeper, in a train station. When his uncle disappears, Hugo decides to keep the clocks running in the station himself so that no one will notice that his uncle is missing and send him to an orphanage.
While Hugo is roaming about the train station passageways fixing the clocks he begins to steal toys from the toy shop located in the station. He is eventually caught by the shopkeeper by the name of Georges Milies and his precious notebook is taken from him.
Hugo has kept this notebook with him since his father died in a fire at a museum. It contains sketches done by his father of an automaton, a mechanical man that he found at the museum. He was fascinated when he found this automaton although it did not work and it became his and Hugo’s passion to fix it. The automaton is a machine that is in the form of a man sitting at a desk holding a pen getting ready to write or draw something.
Hugo has kept this notebook with him since his father died in a fire at a museum. It contains sketches done by his father of an automaton, a mechanical man that he found at the museum. He was fascinated when he found this automaton although it did not work and it became his and Hugo’s passion to fix it. The automaton is a machine that is in the form of a man sitting at a desk holding a pen getting ready to write or draw something.
Ever since his father died, Hugo has become obsessed with getting the automaton to work and finding out what it will write. He began stealing the toys from the toyshop so that he could take them apart and use the small parts to fix it.
I was always intrigued by this book when I saw it in the library, but I never took the time to look through it. It is a chapter book that is geared towards middle school students, yet like me they might be wary of choosing to read it because it has so many pages. I consider myself a good reader and I LOVE long books, but I thought a kids book that is as long as this one, 526 pages, might be too long. I was very wrong about this. Brian Selznick , the author, has included many illustrations throughout the book that tell the story just as well as words. In fact, the book is primarily pictures with very few words and the pictures are wonderfully drawn. They are all sketched in black and white and they make the story very interesting.
I have never read any other books by Brian Selznick, but if his other books are similar to this one then I will definitely be picking them up. I read this book in two days and I did not ever want to put it down, I was always on the edge of my seat wondering what was going to happen to Hugo or the automaton.
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