Not just a kid's book. An amazingly written and illustrated tale which, like many have pointed out, feels like a "silent film on paper." I read this book in one sitting and didn't take very long since 284 of the 525 pages were drawings, but the drawings were part of the book. I've never seen another book use illustrations and images like Brian Selznick did - they were literally vital to the story. It combines many different mediums into a graphic novel/regular novel that tells an intricate tale of a young boy named Hugo Cabret, a clock keeper who secretly lives in the walls of a bustling Parisian train station. He keeps many secrets and trinkets, as his life revolves around clockwork - his head is filled with clockwork, or at least that's how he described how he thinks. When he meets a young bookish girl called Isabelle and her godfather, an old grouchy man who runs a toy shop in Hugo's train station, secrets unravel and he discovers that indeed, everything and everyone has its/their place in the world, because it works like clockwork.