It's been some time since I read The Invention of Hugo Cabret, but I knew as soon as I heard that Brian Selznick had released a new book that I wanted to read it. Luckily for me, I was given a copy for Christmas and I'm very appreciative because as soon as I finished reading the book I was reading before this, I sat down and read it.
Wonderstruck, and Hugo Cabret for that matter, are a completely different reading experience from anything else. I've seen people describe it as a graphic novel, but I think it's different from that. By all means, it's a novel and it's heavily graphic in design (of the 640-odd pages, over 460 of them are illustrated), but it's in now way like a comic book, or relies on cells that need to be read/viewed in the correct order. Similar to a sequence in Wonderstruck, I think it's much more like a silent picture, where we are shown sequential images, the size of a movie screen, and then it cuts to text to fill in some of the blanks. The only difference with this one, is that the text is telling a different story completely (or is it?) until they overlap towards the end.
Brian, himself, explains it fairly well in this nifty little video, even if he gives a bit more away of the story than I would have done.
Brian Selznick's books are a delight to behold. The level of detail in his illustrations is astounding and the way they progress and play with the written text is delightful. I can fully recommend them to anyone. They're beautifully produced as well.
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