Shaun Tan, The Arrival (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2007)"Wordless yet containing worlds, Shaun Tan's The Arrival demonstrates the power of fantasy to show us our reality. It is also an example of the rare book that feels full and complete without conventional conflict and conflict resolution.
The story is simple: an immigrant arrives in a strange city and tries to make a life for himself so that one day he can send for his family. He encounters strange, fantastical creatures that are as natural as breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the native inhabitants. He learns the stories of other immigrants who have come to the city. At the end, he is reunited with his family.
I'm giving nothing away by summarizing the plot because it is, as I've said, simple. The complexity and the richness of The Arrival come entirely from the painstaking and effortless execution of the central idea, using a myriad of panels that, mostly in warm sepia tones, convey not just movement but the moment.
One page is just small, square images of cloud formations. Another page is a panoramic bleed of an obelisk-and-symbol-strewn surreal city with vaguely birdlike iconography. But everywhere, in every type of panel, Tan has managed to convey a wealth of motion - the bustle and lively anarchy of urban life - while also conveying a profound and steadying silence and stillness. Tan's commitment to an art style that can accommodate these two extremes simultaneously explains the most odds-defying success of the book: that it seems static but is actually dynamic, that it seems personal, and yet it has grandeur.
This dynamism wedded to depth seems to come from character. Even though the nameless immigrant appears in the panels rather than looking into them, I felt that the sturdy brilliance in Tan's style was reflection of the strength of the character. True, we see the immigrant acting in a solid, honorable way as he tries to become comfortable with the strange, but it's also the warmth and texture of the images that convey this about him.
...And yet, the city is truly strange, filled with odd metamorphosing creatures and bizarre buildings - even if, like all immigrants, the man eventually becomes so accustomed to them that they melt into the background, as familiar to him as an ATM, a cell phone, an automatic door is to us. Nothing in the warmth of the style can ever disguise the alienness of the grotesquely playful beast shown on the front cover of The Arrival. I only have to imagine what it would look like in real life to know that. Yes, this grotesquery works on a symbolic level, showing how foreign a city looks to a newcomer, but it is also highly effective as fantasy. You tend to believe in the world you are shown, and you believe, too, that it has hidden vistas and a purpose and causality.
Have I mentioned the word seamless yet? The simple story, allowing Tan to focus on the complexity of every-day life, has allowed for the creation of what I feel is a seamless classic, one in which every detail has been lovingly and carefully thought out.
Grace notes. This book is full of them, none quite so moving as the dozens of immigrant faces drawn on the inside boards and endpapers. These faces stare out at the reader with a kind of luminous intensity and a wisdom of experience. They are often still visible in glimpses as you turn the pages.
I've read The Arrival three times now, and each time I am more and more convinced it is my favorite graphic novel of the year [2007]." - Jeff VanderMeer
"Some of the most accomplished graphic novels in existence are never identified as such. Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen comes to mind, as does Peggy Rathmann’s Good Night, Gorilla and David Wiesner’s recent Caldecott winner Flotsam. Sendak, Rathmann and Wiesner are best known as children’s book illustrators, but these particular works are pure comics in the way they construct their narratives.Shaun Tan’s latest book could also end up tucked away with the picture books in bookstores. But it plainly acknowledges its medium by presenting quotations on its back cover from graphic-novel luminaries like Jeff Smith, Marjane Satrapi, Craig Thompson and Art Spiegelman.
Tan has been walking the fine line between picture books and graphic novels for years now. The Rabbits (2003), written by John Marsden, has a fight montage that reads like a comic, using panels and captions to advance the action. And The Lost Thing (2004), both written and illustrated by Tan, could also be classified as a graphic novel. Although the story’s prose bears almost all the narrative responsibility, the interplay between text and image, and the paneled layouts, foreshadow Tan’s eventual headlong leap into the medium of comics. With The Arrival, Tan the graphic novelist has finally arrived.
The Arrival tells not an immigrant’s story, but the immigrant’s story. Its protagonist, a young father with vaguely Eurasian features, leaves his home to create a better life for his family in a distant land of opportunity. He struggles to find a job, a place to stay and a sense of meaning in his new existence. Along the way he befriends other, more established immigrants. He listens to their stories and benefits from their kindnesses. The young father reunites with his family as The Arrival draws to a close, and the distant land finally becomes home.
By placing photorealistic human figures in abstract, surreal environments, Tan evokes the intimacy of an individual immigrant experience without ever settling on a specific person, time or place. His drawings depict architecture and clothing that are at once historic and futuristic. Shadowy dragons’ tails haunt the Old Country, while the new land consists of structures and creatures that look like a 6-year-old’s drawings brought to three-dimensional life.
Tan even avoids pinning his story to a particular language. The Arrival is completely wordless. A system of incomprehensible yet eerily familiar symbols takes the place of words on signs and documents.
Though Tan is a native-born Australian, an American ambience pervades his book. Even before the title page, he treats the reader to a full spread of small black-and-white portraits, depicting faces of every shape, age and color. Each pair of eyes projects the living lifelessness of passport photos. These are the mythic “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
When the protagonist finally makes his way to the shores of his new home, he is greeted by two giant statues, twin Statues of Liberty. He then sets up residence in a city that, though clearly fantastical (a white Pac-Man-like creature infests his apartment instead of cockroaches), resembles New York’s historically ethnic neighborhoods. By borrowing American imagery to communicate an otherwise universal story, Tan highlights just how central the immigrant experience is to the way America defines itself.
The cover of The Arrival, made to look like old, worn leather, establishes a family photo album motif that Tan faithfully carries through the entire book. Inside, borderless sepia panels are arranged in careful grids. Creases and unidentifiable splotches elegantly blemish many of the pages. Tan completely eschews motion lines, sound effects and any other comics storytelling devices that would not be found in photographs. Even the spaces between the panels suggest a photo album: instead of the pencil-thin gutters found in most graphic novels, he uses generous half-inch strips of yellowed paper.
The effect is mesmerizing. Reading The Arrival feels like paging through a family treasure newly discovered up in the attic. However, the sheer beauty of Tan’s artwork sometimes gets in the way of his narrative. His panels, like the best photographs, capture the timelessness of particular moments, which can inadvertently endanger the illusion of time passing that a graphic novelist strives to create. The Arrival would almost rather be looked at than read.
Still, that his biggest flaw is making his pictures too pretty speaks to Tan’s skill as a storyteller. In one especially effective scene, the protagonist opens his suitcase to find a ghostly image of his wife and daughter eating dinner. A chair sits empty at the table, reserved for him. A moment later, the suitcase’s actual contents replace the image. The protagonist pulls out a family portrait and nails it to the wall with his shoe. He sits back to contemplate it. A sequence of panels then carries the reader away from him and out the window, showing first his apartment building and finally his adopted city. The city teems with bubbling smoke, swirling highways and origami birds. The young father is lost, both in the quietness of his own memories and in the bustle of an alien land.
Such visual eloquence can only motivate readers to seek out any future graphic novels from Shaun Tan, regardless of where they might be shelved." - Gene Luen Yang
"The Arrival is a graphic novel told without words. It is simply a beautifully illustrated novel whose wordless narrative gives readers an insider’s view of what the immigrant experience is like.The story follows one central character in a documentary like fashion, as he leaves his wife and young daughter to make the long and arduous journey to a world that is completely unfamiliar. Courageous and brave doesn’t even begin to describe the sacrifice that it takes to leave your family behind and to rebuild your life someplace new. This graphic novel may lack words but it speaks a universal language in conveying the confusion, the frustration and the sense of displacement of living in a new country... Of course it ends on a happy note for the family and starts the cycle over again with yet another fresh “arrival” off the boat needing help to navigate this bizarre new world." - Avid Reader
"From the classic literature of Greece to The Tempest to Star Trek, some of the most powerful stories of our time are framed by epic journeys. Australian illustrator Shaun Tan tells this all-too familiar story using a suprisingly unfamiliar medium. His latest work, The Arrival, is a wordless picture book that follows the progress of an immigrant escaping from his native land to plant his roots in a new country. Tan's drawings are gloomy and glossy like old sepia photographs, and reading The Arrival is not unlike going through an old photo album without any guiding captions. We follow the protagonist as he packs his suitcase and walks to the docks accompanied by his wife and young daughter. The ambiguous reasons for his departure are suggested by sinister and threatening shadows that swirl like dragons' tails along the empty streets. After a long boat journey, he arrives with countless other immigrants at his destination. It is a city both recognizable and strange. Surreal monuments commemorate unknown events, boys sell newspapers written in an indecipherable script, the public transport system involves weird hot-air balloon taxis and even the wildlife is alien yet somehow recognisable. To communicate with others the hero is obliged to use the universal language of pictures by drawing sketches of what he needs in a pocket notebook. He encounters other immigrants who through various means tell their own stories of how they came to be there. The book exudes a heavy aura of silence and loneliness; the refined detail of the images and the absence of any words to explain them compels the reader to identify with this outsider in a foreign land, who is himself forced to interpret everything minutely by sight." - Piers Kelly"Finding the words to describe the work of picture book author and illustrator Shaun Tan can be difficult, but given Tan's talent for visual communication, speechlessness seems an appropriate reaction. His unique ability to capture the heart and soul of a story through images more than proves the truth of the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words.
His new book, The Arrival, has 128 pages of sepia-toned, photo-realistic graphite drawings, which tell the story of a man's migration to a foreign place and his temporary separation from his family. The absence of words, along with the mixture of surreal and real images, captures the man's plight perfectly; he's in a new place where most things, including food, animals and language, are incomprehensible.
As far as picture books go, The Arrival is a spectacular anomaly, as is its creator. Tan's books, while marketed as children's, tend to explore quite complex issues. Yet they manage not to alienate younger readers, rather challenging them to develop empathy and (perhaps more realistically) better visual literacy skills." - Angie Schiavone
Shaun Tan, Tales From Outer Suburbia (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2009) )"An exchange student who's really an alien, a secret room that becomes the perfect place for a quick escape, a typical tale of grandfatherly exaggeration that is actually even more bizarre than he says... These are the odd details of everyday life that grow and take on an incredible life of their own in tales and illustrations that Shaun Tan's many fans will love.
This book is an experience. Shaun Tan's mind, I don't even know how you would describe it and coupled with his extremely beautiful art, it's just mind blowing. Basically everything you've ever heard about Shaun Tan is true, he's a master and this book is a true gem.
The stories range from one page to several, from tiny simple illustrations to full page extremely detailed ones. Tales From Outer Suburbia sure seems like a masterwork to me. Even the Table of Contents which is usually very simple in books is extremely beautiful, it might actually be my favorite page in the book. It is a series of postage stamps one for each story. While the stories explore a variety of situations and events they all carry this feeling of a beautiful and haunting imagination." - Aleapopculture
"This may be the most beautiful book you'll see all year [2009]. It's an illustrated collection of stories set in the Australian suburbs, about how the fantastic keeps erupting into the most mundane daily lives. Once you've read it, you may find yourself feeling as though an exchange student from another planet has dropped by and left a glowing matchbox garden in your kitchen cupboard.
The tone is set in the very first story, "The Water Buffalo", in which a water buffalo silently points children in the direction of whatever they're seeking. Tan describes this as if it's the most normal thing in the world; he makes the outlandish so plausible, it seems almost commonplace.
"It's funny how these days, when every household has its own intercontinental ballistic missile, you hardly even think about them." So begins another tale, only four pages long, in which an entire alternative world is imagined, much like our own but skewed. Here, ordinary people are given missiles to look after, and decide to decorate them with butterfly stencils and Christmas lights, turning them into dog kennels and pizza ovens. Whimsical it may be, but it's impossible not to feel a shiver of excitement as you turn the page to see a candy-coloured vision of suburban lawns, each with its own ICBM, like some Norman Rockwell painting from a parallel universe.
Even when Tan's visions are perfectly possible, his characters' imaginations give them heightened significance. In "Broken Toys", two children see a deep-sea diver on a summer street. At first, they think he's insane; then that he's an astronaut; then they try to use him to provoke a surly neighbour. Finally, he prompts a quiet epiphany - something this book could spark in its readers.
Tan's greatest asset is his artwork. Some of his images look like Japanese woodcut prints, others like Renaissance frescoes or sepia photographs. One piece - about how discarded poems turn into enormous balls of paper, floating weightless above the city - is told entirely in scrap fragments. The variety and ingenuity recall the work of Dave McKean or Emily Gravett. There's something very playful about it, yet it has the deep seriousness of all the best play.
The writing is not quite so consistent: some stories feel more fully realised than others. But all are built around arresting central images. Perhaps the best comes in "Our Expedition", in which two children venture to the edge of their suburb, prompted by curiosity as to why the map ends abruptly on a particular page - only to discover that the streets themselves end there; in fact, the whole world ends there. They sit in the middle of the road, legs hanging over the edge, and look out over a great abyss.
It's an extraordinary image, surprising yet inevitable, resonant with all sorts of metaphorical possibilities. And yet it's beautifully grounded in the rivalry of siblinghood, in which winning or losing an argument with your brother counts for more than discovering that the world really is flat after all. That kind of moment is what Shaun Tan excels at, and that's what makes this collection so charming, and so memorable." - SF Said
"The proper way to salute the genius of Shaun Tan would be to draw a picture, or really three pictures. The first image would be of bursting fireworks, for the awe his illustrations inspire. You don’t have to look past the cover of Tales From Outer Suburbia, which shows a figure in one of those old-time deep-sea-diving helmets standing on an otherwise ordinary street, to know what I mean. You almost can’t stop yourself from saying, “Wow.” Or at least I couldn’t.
The second image would be a sorcerer’s hat, to represent the otherworldly magic that Tan sprinkles liberally into his work. He knows just how to drop the extraordinary into the ordinary, creating his own mystical, serendipitous universe.
Finally, there would be a handkerchief, to represent the surprisingly powerful melancholy and longing that both his stories and his pictures evoke.
And all these pictures, like Tan’s, would combine unerring detail, abundant visual wit and a placid impressionism conveying the feeling of memory.
His work is weird, all right, but the best kind of weird — the kind that welcomes you in.
Tales From Outer Suburbia is a collection of illustrated stories about, among other things, a water buffalo who hangs out in a vacant lot and gives directions to local kids; stick figures who get beaten up by neighborhood bullies; a giant dugong that appears on someone’s lawn; and the lonely fate of all the unread poetry that people write — it joins a vast “river of waste that flows out of suburbia.” This last story, by the way, is presented as a flotilla of random scraps that “through a strange force of attraction” come together, the word “naturally” meeting the phrase “many poems are” and then “immediately destroyed.”
For all his talents as an illustrator, Tan also writes extremely well. Each story is an exercise in narrative concision — the characters are vivid and original, the plots blend logic and whimsy, and the endings always pay off, if never quite the way you expect. My favorite, “Our Expedition,” is about a pair of brothers who disagree over what lies beyond the edge of a map their father keeps in his car. One boy is convinced that the world simply ends, as the map implies, while the other insists that this would be impossible. They make a bet and head out on a long trek to see for themselves. It is a wonderful extrapolation of a youthful argument, and it resolves with a stunning, surrealistic illustration across two pages.
Tan’s work overflows with human warmth and childlike wonder. But it also makes a perfect adult bedtime story, a little something to shake loose your imagination from the moors of reality right before your own dreams kick in." - Hugo Lindgren
"Shaun Tan messes everything up for me. His books don’t read like other books. His text (now that I’ve seen it for the first time) doesn’t bloody read like the text of other people. He’s not just writing new kinds of stories, but reinventing the very nature of short story collections, personal histories, sketchbooks, suburban metaphors, and on and on they go. Would you believe me if I told you that I’ve tried several times to cut apart a couple layers of this book for boxing up purposes, only to find myself staring for several minutes at some small detail, font, or turn of phrase on a given page? You know what? Don’t go asking me who this book is for. Don’t ask me what the age range is, or how you’re going to catalog it, or what kind of person you could give it to for a birthday present. You want an easy book that slots into your preconceived notions of what constitutes children’s literature? Well forget it, sister. This isn’t it. Tales from Outer Suburbia is a book for every human being you know, from the age of nine and up. It’s heartbreaking, and funny, and weird, and smart, and unlike any other book you’ve read up until this point in time. It’s what happens when someone tells you a dream they just had and you end up crying and laughing at the description all at once. It’s brilliant, and I’m inadequate to describe it to you, though I’ll do my best to try.
Okay. Rather than go through my standard first paragraph opening, second paragraph description, third and onward paragraph critique, I’m going to follow my old pattern, but shake things up a little. If you hold a copy of Tales from Outer Suburbia in your hand you’ll see that it’s just 96 pages or so long. A relatively thin book, but the language is more advanced than your average early chapter book. The endpapers are tiny sketches. Tons of them. But I’ll get to those later. The Table of Contents shows a range of tiny stamps on a brown paper package, each one with the title of its chapter writ small. And then you get to the stories themselves and it’s about here that I start to break down. I mean, do you want the general gist of what you’ll find here? In brief, each tale takes place (to some extent) in suburbia. Where people have lawns and bus stops and playgrounds. But it’s a suburbia where the peculiar is almost commonplace (though anything that shakes up the neighbors takes on a special glow). There are tales of water buffalos, rescued turtles, marriage quests, and a single nameless holiday. It’s the stuff that crawls around in your head when you're half asleep, and you could maybe even chalk it all up to subconscious ramblings if the stories didn’t make so much sense and didn’t linger in your head for quite so long. It doesn’t quite do to pick this book apart, but I really can’t resist doing so. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.
The most obvious thing to compare to this, if comparisons are something we have to make, is The Twilight Zone. The last time suburbia got this skewered with the unknown, it was in that post-war Rod Serling era. Maybe history repeats itself. Maybe our new era with our new president and our new hope in the American dream means that suburbia will once again take on those mythic qualities it was once thought to have. In the past Shaun Tan has said that the notion of suburban communities has always fascinated , why not? Suburbia is a state of safety and collective agreement that can go terribly wrong when left to its own devices. There’s a kind of insanity to it, and Tan has very delicately placed a finger on that insanity’s pulse. He will give you a sense of it, but you will never quite see the whole.
I only know Mr. Tan through what I have read of him in interviews, on his website, and through his books. But if I were a betting woman and someone asked me to place money on the story in this collection that is closest to the author’s heart, I might consider “Eric” and give a long glance at “Broken Toys”, but in the end I’d put my faith in “No Other Country”. Because, really, here we have a story that combines the two themes of Mr. Tan’s work. There is the notion of being the other, the stranger, the immigrant in a place you do not want to be and where you do not feel like you belong. And then you have this story about a family in a country that they do not feel is their own, finding a little sanctuary under their own roof. The kind of thing that they discover only occurs in the country they are now in. That story felt more personal than the others here.
And there is only one story in this collection that I read over and over and over and over again, trying to make sense of what I’d just experienced. It’s a story that sounds like a Ray Bradbury tale. Thinking about it, Bradbury’s suburban science fiction is like an older, darker brother of Tan’s. Both enter the impossible into the seemingly mundane, but when Bradbury did it you were sometimes left feeling contented or chilled. In comparison, even the happiest story in Tan’s collection has a bittersweet aftertaste to it. The “Make Your Own Pet” sequence is a good example of this. But in one case Tan veers dead-on into Bradbury territory. “The Amnesia Machine” demands that you read it yourself, so I will simply say that of all the tales here, it was the only one that left me feeling a bit chilled. Essentially, if you need a story for a bookgroup discussion, and I include all ages in that statement, this here’s your best bet.
It is significant, don’t you think, that I’ve not really mentioned Tan’s art up until this point? Anyone who read The Arrival cover to cover would know that as an artist Tan is without compare. Of course, The Arrival didn’t really give the man a chance to explore his range. It was sort of an all-sepia, all-the-time showing. There’s nothing wrong with that, but one of the reasons I like Tales so much in comparison is that it really allows Mr. Tan a chance to bust a move when he feels like it. As a result you have the woodblock/scratchboard technique of The Nameless Holiday alongside the Chris Van Allsburg-like use of mixed media and graphite in The Amnesia Machine. He employs a distinctly Japanese-inspired painting technique for “Broken Toys” whereas “Alert But Not Alarmed” uses bold colors to display light when it’s directly above your head in the middle of the day. And I could on naming the other techniques or cooing over his use of light (he really is quite good with it) but it’s all for naught unless you see it for yourself. Which you should. You really should. And for the record I’m glad the publisher didn’t go the crazy route and get tactile with this book. I like seeing little stamps in lieu of chapters in the Table of Contents, but I wouldn’t actually want to be able to pluck them out. There’s sense behind the design here.
And now we go about dedicating one whole paragraph to the endpapers. Now, I don’t actually know the story behind Tales of Outer Suburbia but it seems pretty clear to me that these stories didn’t happen overnight. Some of them probably were written and drawn over the course of several years. In the Advanced Readers Galley (I cannot vouch for the final copy) you will find that in “Make Your Own Pet”, in the lower right hand corner of the second page is the faintest possible white ink reading “Tan 2001”. Now look at the endpapapers of this book. Aren’t they beautiful? They look like Mr. Tan’s sketchbook. A place where he randomly included any tiny thought or idea that popped into his head. A couple of the critters here made it into the book too. There’s Eric (in both the front and the back of the book). There’s the mouthless creature that sports a single huge lashless eye. There’s what looks like one of the rabbits from the book he did with John Marsden called The Rabbits. And there’s that snakey dragon tail so prominent at the beginning of The Arrival. You’re left wondering if this is from his actual sketchbook. Did he write a story for every image here? Could someone else? I like to imagine a classroom somewhere where a teacher hands this book to the students and encourages them to write a short story to accompany one of the hundreds of tiny pictures found here. I know which one I’d do. It would be the picture of a grumpy old man with a cheery, possibly caped, sprite on his shoulder that cries out, “Carpe diem!” " - Elizabeth Bird
"The term 'suburbia' may conjure visions of vast and generic sameness, but in his hypnotic collection of 15 short stories and meditations, Tan does for the sprawling landscape what he did for the metropolis in The Arrival. Here, the emotional can be manifest physically (in “No Other Country,” a down-on-its-luck family finds literal refuge in a magic “inner courtyard” in their attic) and the familiar is twisted unsettlingly (a reindeer appears annually in “The Nameless Holiday” to take away objects “so loved that their loss will be felt like the snapping of a cord to the heart”). Tan's mixed-media art draws readers into the strange settings, a la The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. In “Alert but Not Armed,” a double-page spread heightens the ludicrousness of a nation in which every house has a government missile in the yard; they tower over the neighborhood, painted in cheery pastels and used as birdhouses (“If there are families in faraway countries with their own backyard missiles, armed and pointed back at us, we would hope that they too have found a much better use for them,” the story ends). Ideas and imagery both beautiful and disturbing will linger." - Publishers Weekly"After teaching the graphic format a thing or two about its own potential for elegance with The Arrival, Tan follows up with this array of 15 extraordinary illustrated tales. But here is an achievement in diametric opposition with his silent masterpiece, as Tan combines spare words and weirdly dazzling images—in styles ranging from painting to doodles to collage—to create a unity which holds complexities of emotion seldom found in even the most mature works. The story of a water buffalo who sits in a vacant lot mysteriously pointing children "in the right direction" is whimsical but also ominous. The centerpiece, "Grandpa's Story," recalling a ceremonial marriage journey and the unnameable perils faced therein, captures a tone of aching melancholy and longing, but also, ultimately, a sense of deep, deep happiness. And the eerie "Stick Figures" is both a poignant and rather disturbing narrative that plays out in the washed-out daylight of suburban streets where curious, tortured creatures wait at the ends of pathways and behind bus stops. The thoughtful and engaged reader will take from these stories an experience as deep and profound as with anything he has ever read." - Booklist
“Nameless, ageless, genderless first-person narrators bring readers into offbeat yet recognizable places in this sparkling, mind-bending collection. In “Our Expedition,” siblings set out to see if anything exists beyond the end of their father’s road map. Dysfunctional parents and the child they ignore are brought together when a dugong appears in their front lawn in “Undertow.” With these and other short stories, Tan brings magic to places where magic rarely happens in books. These are fairy tales for modern times, in which there is valor, love and wisdom—without dragons and castles. The accompanying illustrations vary widely in style, medium and palette, reflecting both the events and the mood of each story, while hewing to a unifying sense of the surreal. In some stories, Tan has replaced the sparse, atmospheric text entirely with pictures, leaving the reader to absorb the stunning visual impact of his imagined universe. Several poems—and a short story—told via collage are included. Graphic-novel and text enthusiasts alike will be drawn to this breathtaking combination of words and images.” - Kirkus Reviews
"Fifteen short texts, each accompanied by Tan’s signature black-and-white and full-color artwork, take the mundane world and transform it into a place of magical wonders. In the opening tale, a water buffalo sits in an abandoned suburban lot, offering silent but wise direction to those youngsters who are patient enough to follow his guidance. In “Eric,” the title character (a tiny, leaflike creature) visits a family as a foreign exchange student and fascinates them with his sense of wonder. His parting gift to the family is sure to warm even the coldest heart. Other stories describe the fate of unread poetry, the presence of silent stick figures who roam the suburbs, or an expedition to the edge of a map. In spirit, these stories are something akin to the wit and wisdom of Shel Silverstein. The surrealist art of Rene Magritte also comes to mind, but perhaps Chris Van Allsburg’s beloved The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (1984) comes closest as a comparable work. While somewhat hard to place due to the unusual nature of the piece, this book is a small treasure, or, rather, a collection of treasures." - School Library Journal
“Strip away the banalities at the center of contemporary suburban life and you’ll find wonder at its edges—that would seem to be the common theme that connects these richly illustrated short stories and vignettes by Australian author/illustrator Tan. Over a dozen stories of slight to extreme weirdness include “Eric,” about a very foreign foreign-exchange student; “Undertow,” which describes a neighborhood’s reaction to the sudden and surprising appearance of a dugong (kin to the American manatee) in a front yard; “Our Expedition,” about a pair of brothers who explore the terrain where the map ends. Each tale sets in motion a mystery that points to the philosophical questions that underlie quotidian experience: Is the map the territory? What happens to the things we lose, break, or just let go of? What do outsiders see that we miss? How does love grow? What happens to our potential when we stop asking questions? Whence justice for those who are loyal, but weak and disempowered? What is the true nature of sacrifice? What is worth danger and risk? What have we forgotten? Tan finds remarkable ways to get at these big questions, creating stories that are accessible and sometimes funny but that require active reading and that preclude tidy, concise reductions to a single meaning or theme; the use of first-person narration, often combined with a second-person address, pulls readers into these strangely unstrange worlds. The illustration styles vary by story to echo and enhance the emotional content and set the tone as well as to carry the narrative on occasion: there’s painted suburban noir and softly textured monochrome, fake newspaper stories and scrapbook-style narratives.” - Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
“Tales from Outer Suburbia is not quite like anything else, and that's perhaps the best thing of all about it, opening up reading as a sort of strong, wild and individual activity.” - Chicago Tribune
“Tan’s mixed-media art, with its surreal landscapes, rescued turtles, and decorated missiles, both illuminates the text and highlights the strange beauty of the ordinary.” - Washington Post
