So what about this 526-page book makes it so appealing to children? Author-illustrator Brian Selznick’s unique approach to storytelling combines words and pictures (284 illustrations to be exact) in a truly original fashion, making it an engaging experience for readers of all ages.

I recommended this tale to my friend’s son who is more of a nonfiction reader and he became instantly hooked as well. The Invention of Hugo Cabret was the first one we shared together and she wouldn’t let me put it down. “And sometimes I think they’re Martians … but … mostly, I just think they’re beautiful.I had a list of books I wanted to read aloud to my daughter when she was a 10-year-old. What are the lights? “Sometimes I think they’re angels,” says a boy. Inexplicable, kaleidoscopic lights shine into a forest near a small town. While each tale seems like a sliver of a larger story we’ll never learn, we get the impression that we’re hearing the best part. But readers of any age who love literature will find questions that demand engagement, images that refuse to fade from the mind. Certainly some young readers will feel this way, and lose interest.

I wanted more - a hidden narrative to uncover, a key that would unlock the book’s secrets. Indeed by the middle of “Kaleidoscope” I became frustrated, like the boy. “ It was an impossible task,” the omniscient amnesiac narrator muses, “but the gesture touched me somehow.” The boy is furious: “ What’ s the point of knowing everything if you forget it and can’ t even figure out where the answers are?” Later we find the boy trying desperately to organize the books. But the narrator, despite having written every book himself, by hand, doesn’t know, doesn’ t even remember what he has written. The boy wants to know where his story is. We get two pieces per tale - first a kaleidoscopic image of shapes broken into crystalline forms then, on the next page, the scene that was being refracted: a ship, a dragon, a clock, vines, a castle.Ī mysterious narrator takes a boy to a library where the books tell the story of everything that ever happened, and everything that ever will happen. Then he uses the glittering shards to make incandescent scenes of catastrophe.Įach tale is accompanied by art, which, as we’ve come to expect from Selznick, is stunning. To soothe himself in the face of the immense pain of the world, a man steals and hoards beautiful objects, but in a fit of rage and despair he smashes them all.

The Robot King by Brian Selznick