It’s funny because when I was working on the book, the only thing I was thinking about was figuring out how to make the story work. I didn’t know who was going to read it, I didn’t know who would be interested in it. A lot of people, when I told them I was working on a book for kids about French silent cinemas, said, “That doesn’t sound like a very good idea. Like what kid’s gonna be interested in French silent movies.” My editor at Scholastic had a really great bit of advice for me and she said, “You know, if the things in the story are important to the main character, then they’ll be important to the reader.” And movies are really important to the main character.
I just kept working and then the idea for the pictures grew and suddenly it’s this 550 page book. I didn’t know if kids were gonna like it, I didn’t know what age kid would like it. I think one of the things that’s been the most thrilling since the book came out is that I have heard many stories of teachers and parents who have given the book to kids who don’t read a lot or who haven’t read or who were struggling with their reading and it turns out because of the balance with the words and the pictures that it helps you get into the story in a sort of an easier way.
The book opens with a 44 pages of drawings, so by the time you get to the end of that you’re nearly 50 pages into the book. You already feel like you’ve accomplished something. You’ve already met all the characters. You’ve set up the situation for the story. You’ve been introduced to the location, to Paris, and the train station and the secret access into the walls of the train station.
So hopefully by the time you get to the first words you are already kind of hooked on what’s happening.
A lot of the pages have a lot of white space for the text. Not every page that has text is completely filled with words, because sometimes it’s just like two paragraphs. There’s that satisfaction of being able to read through it very fast and because it’s 550 pages and it’s heavy, it’s like nearly 3 pounds, you get to walk around with this thing that you kind of conquered, you know, that you are able to like master. That’s not something I had thought about when I was working on the book but I find it really wonderful that that’s something that kids and teachers and parents are finding.
I’m also finding that parents and teachers are telling me that their kids are asking them to rent French silent movies to watch, to see A Trip to the Moon, the full movie, which you can see on-line now. The whole 16 minute movie is on-line. I’ve had kids ask me about Harold Lloyd because throughout the book there are also film stills from actual silent movies along with all the drawings that I did. We see film stills from the movies of George Méliès and we see Harold Lloyd in the famous scene where he’s hanging from a clock after he scaled the side of a building.
There’s a scene from one of the very, very first movies by the Lumière Brothers where a train comes into the station, and the story behind that is that the audience screamed and fainted when they first saw that because they had never seen anything so vivid and real, and they really thought a train was coming at them. Might not be a true story but it’s certainly a good one. I really loved that all of these things that went into making the story have, in fact, sort of gotten through to the kids who are reading the book.