Brian Selznick

This book is a unique blend of novel and beautiful graphic narrative that tells a captivating mystery set in a 1930s Paris train station.

The story centers on Hugo Cabret, an orphaned boy who lives secretly within the walls of the station, tending to the clocks. His whole world revolves around a broken automaton, a mechanical man he believes holds a final, secret message from his late father. When he crosses paths with a grumpy toymaker named Georges and his adventurous goddaughter, Isabelle, show more Hugo’s desperate quest kicks off a larger adventure.

What makes this book so gorgeous is its structure: beautiful, intricate black-and-white illustrations to carry the action for long stretches, giving the feeling of watching a dramatic film. The words fill in the details and the characters' deeper emotions. show less

Absolutely adorable! I love Selznick's illustrations, every time he knocks it out of the park, and this picture book is no exception. Baby Monkey is a private eye in this spoof of film noir, who takes on cases such as "The Missing Pizza" or "The Stolen Jewels" or even a stolen Nose! (belonging to a clown) While also eating snacks, taking notes, and taking a nap--and before every case, he has to put on PANTS in a hilarious series of slapstick moves. I love the details in the drawings--the show more illustration of the P.I. office changes for each case, showing different framed art on the walls relating to the case (circus stuff for the clown, or Italian art for the pizza, etc. They are real art or historical figures and there's a key in the back to tell you what they are.) The book even has a spoof bibliography of books like "Famous Pizza Crimes" and an INDEX--in a picture book!--of which page holds which snack, pants, and so forth. So there's something for older kids here as well as for younger ones who just like the illustrations and the repetition of the story, which has a sweet happy ending. show less

Wonder Struck is yet another tour de force from Brian Selznick about two kids fifty years apart in time who are each trying to find where they belong in the world. Like The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the story is told in both text and images, and oh, what images they are!

The story of Ben, age 12, takes place in 1977, initially in Gunflint Lake, Minnesota. The story of Rose, also age 12, is told almost entirely through pictures, and begins in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1927. The stories parallel show more one another as the scene changes to New York City, and they eventually converge in a surprising way at the American Museum of Natural History.

Both of the children have a love for collecting tokens of memories, and for curating them (organizing and looking after them). Ben carried with him a small box, in which he kept mementos that were precious to him. When he got to the museum, and saw the “Cabinets of Wonders” it was as if he were home. And he comes to realize that there is a greater meaning to this activity: "[Ben] thought about what it meant to curate your own life… What would it be like to pick and choose the objects and stories that would go into your own cabinet? How would Ben curate his own life? And then, thinking about his museum box, and his house, and his books…. He realized he’d already begun doing it. Maybe, though Ben, we are all cabinets of wonders.”

Discussion: When we meet Ben, we discover that he is deaf in one ear, and later sustains an injury to the other ear. Rose was born deaf, but to hearing parents. It is fitting therefore that Rose’s story be told only in pictures, because her world has always been a silent one. Like Rose, we observe how much there is to learn just from focusing on the visual.

On the meta level, Selznick pays tribute to a number of giants on whose shoulders he now so ably stands. One is the great writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak, to whom this book is dedicated. Much of Selznick’s style seems similar to Sendak’s. Faces and eyes are large and expressive, and bodies are blocky and more suggestion of function than form – a technique that puts the focus on the feelings expressed by the character. The landscapes, especially the cityscapes and museum interiors, are full of wondrous details. All of the pictures are rendered cinematically, zooming in to make a point or convey an emotion.

Another tribute paid by Selznick is to E. L. Konigsburg, who won the 1968 Newbery Medal for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. In that book, Claudia Kincaid, an 11-year-old girl, runs away from home because she thinks her parents do not appreciate her. She takes her younger brother Jamie with her, and they hide out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. If you have read Wonder Struck, you will see the parallels.

Evaluation: What can be more wonderful for a reader than when an author follows up a fabulous book with another fabulous book? Selznick, for all the influences on his work, is sui generis, and should not be missed. show less

This reminded me of Dandelion Wine. Vignettes within a common frame, each with its measure of wonder and strangeness, filled with boyhood exuberance but also loss and a ripening awareness that time both passes (irrevocably) and pauses (poignantly), sometimes within the same moment.

Selznick was absolutely right to title this Kaleidoscope. Fragments of imagery recur in these stories, and while I found my own meaning in them, I'm not sure another reader would share it. I bring my own show more experiences of grief and loneliness and my own treasured ideas—among them the vicissitudes of knowledge, the power of wonder, the mutability and tentativeness of reality—to the book, and those lenses shape not just what I see, but how I piece it together.

And maybe this is just more of the same—more of me seeing what I want to see—but while Kaleidoscope might allow its readers to find their own personal truths, I think the kaleidoscope structure, itself, holds a truth about how we respond to loss or trauma. The fragments, the shifting shapes they make, the ways moments form and reform, never reverting to what they were, but telling and retelling stories about where they came from, each story true but incomplete, each story a necessary piece in a mosaic that reconstructs an approximation of what was, even as it shapes and reshapes what is and what will be. show less