I saw the film of this years ago, and never realised that it was from a graphic novel. But there that novel was, in the library, looking the size of a brick and, despite the recommendation I had to read it, I wasn't entirely looking forward to it (see: size of a brick). Then I saw all the pictures and was happier. And really, these pencil illustrations are both effective and interesting. They're fairly simple, essentially shadings of black and white, but they tell a genuinely likeable story. Young Hugo is an orphan, who scurries through the walls of a Parisian train station, taking care of the clocks his uncle used to maintain before said uncle stumbled off in a drunken haze to who-knows-where leaving poor Hugo to fend for himself. It's the station that caught my attention most of all - I don't know if it's actually true that there are all these secret passages, or if Selznick is merely using dramatic license, but either way a secret passage will always, always have my attention.

What's most impressive though, I think, is just how much is packed in here. There's really not that much text to go alongside the drawings, but still, crammed in, is the history of French cinema, clocks, automatons, secret legacies and two children finding each other and becoming friends. And it all comes together perhaps a little too neatly, but as a whole the book just goes to show that even a complicated story can be told simply and well, with a minimum of waffle.