outstanding novel a very good read with lots of heart.!!

my grade 6 teacher read this to us and i loved it so much i am reading it again :)

This book was absolutely amazing. The illustrations added a whole other dimension to the story! Hugo is a young boy orphaned then soon after left on his own to fend for himself and care for the clocks in a Paris station. He discovers a machine he thought was lost when his father died in a fire. But his discoveries do not stop there. Risking exposing himself, he sort of befriends a girl named Isabel and her strange and mean godfather who forces Hugo to work for him in his toyshop. Hugo finds out...more This book was absolutely amazing. The illustrations added a whole other dimension to the story! Hugo is a young boy orphaned then soon after left on his own to fend for himself and care for the clocks in a Paris station. He discovers a machine he thought was lost when his father died in a fire. But his discoveries do not stop there. Risking exposing himself, he sort of befriends a girl named Isabel and her strange and mean godfather who forces Hugo to work for him in his toyshop. Hugo finds out the mystery of the machine and the mystery of Isabel's godfather and his secret past.

Fantastic! I loved how the pictures actually tell the story instead of just accentuating it. Can't wait to read Wonderstruck!

The best book ever! It's so original and unique, the way the author tells the story using mostly pictures and not words. It inspires me a lot to draw, read and write! It's an amazing story and the movie was equally as phenomenal. It's such a success as a book, I definitively recommend this to all ages!

This is such a great book, just like the movie!!! This is a must read... but you should know that it has pictures and word, half and half I would say... But you should definitely read this book and then watch the movie

I recommend this interesting book to be read with or without parents. This book is a very interesting read and the pictures assist in telling the story along with the actual text. The book sort of touches on thievery and how wrong it is, and it also gives examples of consequences of certain actions. The book is a good way of letting children know how different people’s lives can be and how certain things in societies differ when comparing two or more societies. This book is definitely quality literature because everything comes together in order to help the story make more sense and it is also told from more than one perspective.

My 6yo brought this home from her school library. What a fantastic book! I was surprised to see the Caldecott Medal go to a 533-page book, and it totally deserves it. I will be recommending this book to friends who say their kids aren't interested in reading.

In the Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick about Hugo an orphan who lives in the walls of busy paris train station. Suddenly he is whisked away on an adventure when he meets an eccentric girl and a grumpy old man. I think this book is for 9 to 14 year olds full of imagination.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is historical fiction and is written by Brian Selznick. It is 533 pages long but half of them are story telling- pictures (pictures that don't complement the story but are part of it). The Invention of Hugo Cabret won the 2008 Cadelcott book award and has also won numerous others. Hugo is a young boy who lives with his father and helps him repair mechanical objects. His father then finds an abandoned automaton and starts to work on it with Hugo. Hugo's father then dies in a fire. Fast forward. Hugo is a 12 year old orphan who lives in the walls of a Parisian train station and keeps the station's clocks running. He wants to fix the automaton that he and his father had started working on but doesn't have the necessary pieces to do so. He steals them from a toy shop in the train station but the toy shop's owner eventually finds out. He catches Hugo and brings the plans for the automaton home to burn them. When the toy shop's owner's goddaughter finds out that the plans aren't burnt Hugo discovers a mystery that sets him and Isabelle (the toy shop owner's goddaughter) off on an adventure. As you can see this book is full of adventure, suspense, mystery and much more. I would recommend this book to ages 10+ because of the mature events and emotions displayed in this book such as death and our instinct for survival. There are also a lot of pages and that might scare young readers off (although half of them are story-telling pictures which brings me to my next point). The story-telling pictures are such an important part of the story (go figure) and a young reader might get lost if they don't analyze them properly. Would I recommend the book? Yes and here's why. Sure the book has a very intriguing plot but there are also some interesting historical facts to be learned in this book. One of them is about the toy shop's owner who is based on a real person. That person is Georges Melies one of the great pioneers of the film industry. Some other interesting historical facts to be learned are what life was like in 1931 (when the book is set). You can learn things like: what people were wearing, what the living conditions were, the means of transportation and what a few of the jobs were, just to name a few. Another thing that sets this book apart is Brian Selznick's writing style. It is so clear and concise yet it is almost unorthodox. He can describe complex events in a minimal amount of writing so he can let you fill in the obvious blanks. Not only is the writing amazing, but the story-telling pictures bring the book to a whole new level. They make the story easier to understand yet it becomes more difficult because they reveal secrets but unravel more. I believe that visual learners will get more out of the book but the pictures allow anybody to have their own view on what happened because everybody will interpret these differently. Brian Selznick created a masterpiece in The Invention of Hugo Cabret. His picture/writing combination could create a classic that we will all enjoy for years to come. The Invention of Hugo Cabret might have just changed the way we look at novels for a very long time.