That what eventually springs from the pen of the automaton is not text but an iconic image is fitting, since in Hugo Cabret, pages of workmanlike prose serve only to propel the plot forward. Hugo comes to believe that the note the machine might one day produce “was going to answer all his questions and tell him what to do now that he was alone. If Hugo can repair it, it is programmed by the springs and gears hidden within to come to life and write something-Hugo doesn’t know what-on a piece of paper.

Hugo spends his days winding the station’s 27 clocks and his nights tinkering with a broken automaton-a mechanical man that Hugo’s father was fixing when he died. Set in 1931 Paris, it tells the story of an orphan who lives alone in the depths of the Montparnasse railway station.

Of the two, The Invention of Hugo Cabret is the one that makes greater gestures toward high art. The yearlong residence of Hugo Cabret and the “Wimpy Kid” books near the top of the Times chapter-book best-seller list-typically populated by the usual suspects of young-adult best-sellerdom, like fantasy epics and li’l-chick lit-represents the first wave of a potential revolution in the YA market: the incursion of comics into “respectable” children’s fiction. It’s not surprising, though, that manga is overlooked by adults the medium’s rows and rows of identically shaped books with confusing titles ( Naruto? Hot Gimmick? Fruits Basket?!) are too alien for most adults to treat with anything other than a shrug and an “At least they’re reading, right?” But for typical young-teen readers, graphic storytelling is now as familiar a language as traditional chapter books-and one they expect to find in bookstores, not on spinner racks.Īs barriers to the acceptance of mainstream graphic storytelling are falling, two writers-Brian Selznick, author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and Jeff Kinney, creator of the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series-have seized on the shift in young people’s reading expectations to make enormous hits out of books that mix comics and literature in clever ways. Manga-pocket-size comics usually translated from the Japanese-are now a driving force in the young-adult market, with sales of over $220 million in the U.S. Unless, that is, you’re 13 years old, in which case it might be the only section you patronize: the manga section. The real sea change in young people’s reading habits over the past ten years has come not from the boy wizard-whose unreplicable success was a lightning strike of fantastic storytelling, canny marketing, and dumb luck-but from a section of the bookstore that you likely ignore. A spread from The Invention of Hugo Cabret.įorget Harry Potter.

The invention of hugo cabret series