Three and one-half stars

What attracted me to this book was not the cover art, nor the illustrations; nor the fact that some of the binding is of the same time-period as the story itself. What attracted me to this book was the back-story about a very real French turn-of-the-century Filmmaker, Illusionist, and Toymaker Georges Melies (Me-lez) and his fascination with the Automaton.

The author, Brian Selznick is also the book’s illustrator. And how could he not be? The illustrations do not compliment the text; the illustrations continue the text.

Follow closely now as Selznick was awarded The Caldecott Metal for this book.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Hugo, but only gave it three ½ stars because the text, without all the hoopla was pretty much a flat-line throughout. Remove the pencil drawings; the black border around every page; unravel the thread that binds sixteen of those pages so as to mimic the era of the printing business in Paris during the 1930s; and pretend, for the sake of argument, that we’ve never heard of Georges Melies and don‘t know what the heck an Automaton is, we are left with about 200 pages of text about a boy who meets a Toymaker with a secret.

The book as a whole is ingenious, inventive and intriguing but the story itself, in my opinion, was a letdown.

YA-historical fiction
533 pages
Scholastic Press; First Edition (January 30, 2007)