Hugo is a young orphan boy who leads an invisible life in a busy Paris train station. When his uncle and guardian, the station clockkeeper dies, Hugo finds himself at the crossroads of a life-changing adventure. He comes across a grumpy old man who runs a toy shop; a bookish girl; a mysterious noteook; and a broken automaton. I don't want to give away much more of the plot, but suffice it to say that the chain of events in this story is definitely not predictable.

Listen to author Brian Selznick read from the book (on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered") (Click to read along.)
Watch a slideshow of the first few pages of the book

    What sets this book apart as a "pioneer genre" are its gorgeous charcoal pencil sketches and illustrations that actually move the story along. (Imagine watching a movie on paper!) As Selznick puts it, "This is not exactly a novel, and it’s not quite a picture book, and it's not really a graphic novel, or a flip book, or a movie but a combination of all these things." Even more fascinating is how Selznick has written a novel in which a real-life personality, the French filmmaker George Melies, is a character. This is a different type of historical fiction, too!

Here's a challenge for you: If you can name a work of fiction in which a real-life person is a character, we'll send you an autographed copy of The Invention of Hugo Cabret. (We're giving away 4 copies.) You can post your answer in the "comments" section below, or email us at word@weeklyreader.com.
   
More: Read a Q&A with Selznick and find out about the inspiration for his groundbreaking book ...

Q: The Invention of Hugo Cabret combines words and pictures in a truly original way. The storytelling happens visually, unfolding like a series of film stills, and also in segments that read like a novel. When you started working on the book, which came first, writing or drawing? How did you decide which scenes to draw, and which to describe with words?

A: I started writing the book as a traditional novel, thinking it would have perhaps one drawing per chapter.  But I love picture books and the idea of visual narratives, and I’ve wondered what would happen if you illustrated a novel like a picture book. I’ve experimented with this idea a little bit in some novels by other authors I’ve illustrated, like The Meanest Doll in the World by Ann M. Martin and Laura Godwin, as well as Our House by Pam Conrad.  I created visual openings for these books, so the reader’s first connection to the story is through the pictures.

I’ve always loved the wild rumpus in Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, because the words disappear, the pictures take up the whole page, and we move forward in the story by turning the pages.  The more I thought about this idea, the more I thought how interesting it would be to have part of The Invention of Hugo Cabret  The pictures would be like a series of silent movies running throughout the book, helping to tell the story.  When I got this idea, I had to go back and take OUT all the text that I was going to replace with pictures. I wrote long lists of what I wanted each picture to be in each visual sequence and then made small dummy books of those visual sequences to make sure that the story was getting across in the pictures. told with pictures, because the story involves the early history of cinema.

Q: The story is partly inspired by Georges Méliès, an early French filmmaker whom some people credit with making the first ever science fiction films. When did you first see one of his films? What aspects of Georges Méliès’ work and life story seemed to you like good starting points for a work of fiction for children?

A: I don’t remember when I first saw A Trip to the Moon, Georges Méliès’ most famous movie, but I do remember loving it.  It’s a silent movie made in 1902 and it’s funny and beautiful and strange.  I thought it would be great to one day write a story about the man who made this movie, but that idea sat in the back of my head for over ten years.  I eventually learned about a book called Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life by Gaby Wood, about the history of automata, which are wind-up mechanical figures that often seem to be alive.  Gaby wrote a chapter about Méliès, who owned a collection of automata that he donated to a museum when he could no longer afford to keep them. The museum didn’t take care of them and they were destroyed and thrown away.  I imagined a boy finding one of those automata, and that’s how the story began.

Méliès began his career as a magician, and he always filmed his movies as if they were stage productions an audience would sit and watch.  He was a great artist who lost everything and was rediscovered at the end of his life and celebrated once again.  His use of magic, his belief in the power of imagination, and the joy he experienced as he created his art seemed to me the kinds of things that kids would understand.

Q: What kind of research did you do while you were creating The Invention of Hugo Cabret?

A: I read a lot of books and I traveled to Paris three times to research the book.  I walked around the streets where Méliès lived at the end of his life, and I photographed everything. Also, when I’m researching a book I like to talk to people who are experts on the subjects I am writing about or illustrating.  I talked to lots of experts for this book.  I talked to a young man who owns a clock shop in New York that his father founded many years ago, and I talked to scholars of film history. I also talked to a man named Andy Baron who is a mechanical genius.  Like Hugo, he’s able to fix just about any kind of machine, and he gave me lots of advice about how machines work, what they are made of, and what tools Hugo would have needed to fix them.

Q: What do you want readers to come away with when they read this book?

A:  Well, what I’m trying to do is to make a fun and unusual story about situations and characters and historical events that really interest me.  I hope readers will like following Hugo’s adventures, and I hope they will enjoy learning about the history of movies, and automata, and the city of Paris.  I also hope that readers will enjoy how the story is told, with the combination of words and pictures all blending together into a single cinematic narrative.