YA Book Review: The Invention of Hugo Cabret

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When you go to bed thinking about the novel you haven't finished reading yet, when you wake up several times thinking about the novel you haven't finished reading yet, when go over in your head what you want to write on your blog before you finishing reading the novel...you are reading a good book.

I read Wonderstruck first, a few months back, and heard my 8th grade students mutter that The Invention of Hugo Cabret was better.

While I won't weigh one against the other, I will say that I loved this novel. And I have become a fan of Brian Selznick's voice.

I like the charm and nostalgic atmosphere around his characters. Both Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck takes the reader back towards the silent film era, the early parts of the twentieth century. He brings actors and buildings and real moments from history to life. Ultimately, he weaves a stories together that send me running to Google--I want to see the connections; I want to see the faces.

In the Caldecott-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the reader follows the journey of Hugo, an orphaned twelve year-old. Hugo steals to eat, and he steals mechanical toys to bring an automaton to life--he believes it belonged to his father, and if he can make it work again, perhaps it would write him a message...a message from his father.

In the process, readers come to know the name Georges Melies (magician, inventor, filmmaker, dreamer)--Selznick has a great knack of resurrecting important and influential history. I love how he uses museums, celestial mythology, and friendship in each.

Museums are places of magic, imagination, and wonder.

The mythology--the lightning in Wonderstruck; the legend of Promethus and the stars on Melies' cape (Hugo) are the centers of that familiar rustling we feel and hear--the ancient bonds we have with the natural world--awestruck, our very core still regards the stars, the moon, the lightning as the forces romanticized by Shakespeare. Humans star at them in the same manner as dogs will stare off towards the woods--a thread of ancestral memory tweaked--feeling more than remembering the days when they roamed free, undomesticated.

The magic in the friendships--boy to girl--and child to adult--distinguishes itself from much of the conflict written today. A year or so ago, I asked YA author Christina Gonzalez if she could think of any YA novels featuring a male adult with a positive influence and connection to the teen protagonist. I had recently read Jacqueline Kelly's The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate and connected with grandfather--and respected the relationship Kelly managed to forge between male adult and child. Selznick does that here to a certain degree. While Hugo and Melies' relationship begins with theft, the reader understands (long before we learn who Melies is from history) that the old man feels a developing bond, sees something in the kid, and we can feel that they are destined to come together at the end of the story.

A wholesome adventure--imagine fresh milk and homemade apple pie from your great grandparents--and imagine sitting with them and enjoying it with them for the first time.

Read the book, and then put it in your classroom library. When a kid asks for something to read--you can hand them this book with confidence.

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YA Book Review: Wonderstruck

Alternating pages of wordless charcoal and pencil sketches with pages of text, Brian Selznick's YA novel Wonderstruck strikes all the right chords.  It is a book to safely place in your middle school classroom library.

Combining the classical appeal of the story of a young girl, Rose, journeying to New York City to see a starlet in the 1920s with the contemporary artist's hand of using imagery to tell a story, Sezlnick subtly tells one character's backstory in the format of a graphic novel.  Once Rose's story intersects with the the protagonist's arc, Ben, then both forms combine as well--graphic novel and the written word--into one plot.

Both main characters are deaf--both are driven to find a parent in NYC--both find each other without ever knowing the other existed.  Rose's mother, a famous actress in NYC, has no time for her daughter.  Ignoring her sign language lessons, Rose escapes her house in Hoboken to find her mother.  Ben, of the other hand, finds his way to NYC in part through his nightmares.  Early in the novel Ben believes the wolves in his dreams are chasing him--on the contrary, they are driving him, pushing him, calling to him of you will, to NYC to find his father.

Personally, I find a lot to like about this book on several levels:

a) We're a visual society and as digital reading and writing evolves we experience the continued premium placed on imagery as story teller, and the rise and respect of the graphic novel form--I think this emerging form is more encouraging to young people than anything else out there--I never had the opportunity to read books like this when I was 12 or 13...they just didn't exist.  How would my love of story telling and artistic curiosity have formed differently had I been exposed to these two forms together?  It just wasn't done...and taken seriously.

b) The simple, clean plot elevates the YA form--I've been reading a preponderance of YA novels containing smoking, cursing, sex, suicide, depression, and mental health issues...among other heavy topics...it was refreshing to read a YA novel that did not engage those often gritty and controversial subjects.

c) While the themes of parents abandoning the child for work, and what happens when a parent dies, both serious matters at their core, provide the backdrop of the novel neither drives the journey...love drives the novel...love certainly drives the curiosity and desires of both Rose and Ben and through the use of both imagery and language the theme of love rises above all else.

d) Finally, as a reader, you can't ignore the fact that the two protagonist's are deaf--it almost feels incredible to say that the use of deaf characters unique, but it is--I was brought back to the beautiful Carson McCullers novel The Heart is Lonely Hunter by Selzick's use of deaf characters with bold adolescents.

Appealing, charming, and technically inspiring, put Wonderstruck in your middle school classroom library.

Frederic Remington’s Moonlight, Wolf