The
Invention of Hugo Cabret
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Copyright Date: 2007
# of Pages: 533
Genre: Historical Fiction
Brain Selznick
was able to captivate me as an adult in this children’s story about a boy who
lives within a train station alone. He has to steel food to eat even though he
works on the clocks. Through the trials of losing his clockmaker father and
being displaced and abandoned, Hugo makes for a character that you can’t help
to both pity and fall in love with. He’s a genius child with a plan to repair
the automaton –a mechanical man-- his father found for him to find the message
his father left in the machine.
The illustrations
were done in pen. The Selznick was able to make good use of negative space
because on the rare occasion that every inch of the page wasn’t covered with
details, you took notice. I love how the illustrator zooms in to the train
station with the first few pages around the frontispiece and leaflet then zooms
out in the end. The illustrator made good use of perspectives. The images say
so many words that the many pages where there is no writing, only drawings,
that you get such a closer perspective into Hugo’s experience. It’s almost like
watching a movie which is completely relevant to the plot.
This book would
be more appropriate for your fourth grade classes and up to read alone. I could
see this book being a good read aloud book for the third grade though. You could
do some literature projects with plot summary. You could talk about French
culture and the history of the war that was referred to in the book. There are
so many projects you could even do chapter by chapter with student’s drawing
and writing what they thing is going to happen next in the story.
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