The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a children's book like none you've ever read before.
When you go to the bookstore, do you sometimes crave to find a book like none you’ve ever read to your child before? Are you looking for a change of pace, something with less wizardry and yet still full of magic? The Invention of Hugo Cabret: A Novel in Words and Pictures by Brian Selznick (Scholastic Press, ISBN-10: 0-439-81378-6) is such a book.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a whopping 500 plus pages long. It seems like it would take forever to read through, but when you open it up you’ll discover 284 pages of amazing black and white illustrations. Each pictures shows the story that is being told, moving the reader along at a fast, almost gut wrenching pace.
The story begins in Paris, 1931, with a boy named Hugo Cabret. Hugo lives with his father, a clock maker, and begins to learn the trade. One day, Hugo’s father comes across an automaton of a man in the attic of a small museum. Excited and urged on by Hugo, his father begins to work on the automaton. There are pieces missing and rusting parts in the mechanical man so Hugo’s father meticulously begins to draw each piece and part in a special notebook. Hugo’s father becomes almost obsessed with fixing the automaton and, on Hugo’s birthday, his father gives him the notebook filled with the detailed drawings.
Suddenly, tragedy strikes. One night, as Hugo’s father is working on the automaton in the museum’s attic, a night guard accidentally locks his father inside. A fire breaks out. Hugo’s father never makes it out of the building.
Hugo is taken in by his uncle and lives with him in the old, abandoned workers quarters inside the walls of the train station. There his uncle teaches him how to care for all the clocks in the train station. Twice a day, Hugo oils and winds the huge clocks from inside the wall.
Life is barely livable. Hugo’s uncle is a drunk and there is never any money for food. His uncle teaches Hugo how to steal croissants and bottled milk to survive. One day, his drunken uncle leaves the station and never returns. Hugo is alone and on his own.
Being free of his uncle, Hugo packs what meager possessions he has and leaves the train station. Where will he go? He shivers in the cold weather and walks down a road. He then becomes aware that he is standing by the burned down museum. He looks and there in the rubble he sees it: the automaton his father was working on before he died.
Hugo gathers the badly damaged mechanical man and, having nowhere else to go, heads back to the train station.
This is but the very beginning of the story of The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Twists, turns, oddities, and coincidences begin to take form as Hugo fixes the mechanical man and uncovers secrets from long ago.
