Growing a Reader: Kids' Books, Tips and More

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being an adult who is excited for a children’s book to arrive in stores or at the library. For me, that book is Brian Selznick’s Wonderstruck, the highly anticipated follow-up to The Invention of Hugo Cabret arriving mid-September.

Wonderstruck tells two stories of two children, Rose and Ben, who are both deaf. In 1977, Ben runs away from his aunt and uncle to search for his lost father and in 1927 Rose runs away from home to find the mother who left her as a baby. Through mysterious clues both characters end up at the Museum of Natural History in New York and discover what they’ve been searching for in an unexpected way.

Looks interesting, right? You’ll notice that this book (and Selznick’s previous) is not quite a traditional prose novel, not quite a graphic novel and not quite a picture book, but rather a strange mash-up of all three.

When The Invention of Hugo Cabret came out in 2007, librarians instantly loved it. They loved it so much that the book won'the Caldecott Medal in 2008, the first novel to ever win the award that is normally given to a picture book.

Thankfully books like Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck tend to get people talking about the use of illustrations in “big kid” books. Many ask the question: do pictures make a book easier to read or more complex?

I think the answer is ‘yes’, on both accounts.  Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck are similar to graphic novels in that the text presents one level of meaning and the illustrations another.  With graphic novels text and illustration are read together but in Wonderstruck the two are separate and offer two parallel stories—Ben’s story in text and Rose’s story in illustration. In both instances, the reader must follow both to get the complete story. And while having consecutive pages of wordless illustration may give the reader a break from “real reading”, readers still must use all their skills of inferring and meaning-making to understand how the illustrated sections relate to the whole story.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret will soon get a chance to reach a wider audience – Hugo directed by Martin Scorsese will be hitting theatres in late November and you may find excited requests for the book that the movie’s based on and also Brian Selznick’s new book, Wonderstruck.