The Arrival
by Shaun Tan
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Book Reviews of The Arrival
Book Review: So much story - without words
Summary: 5 Stars
If all graphic novels were this good, everyone would read them. My adult son showed me this book, and Shaun Tan's drawings were inspiring and the story a revelation! I realized I had never really considered how my great-grandparents felt when they arrived in the United States before 1900. I had assumed they were excited or thrilled, even though they had serious adjustments to make. "The Arrival" literally shows the reader how strange a new place can be and what culture shock feels like.
You could frame many of the pages as great art. With pathos and humor, the artist shows us how resilient humans can be - or must be. Think how overwhelming it is to be thrust into a bizarre environment without knowing the language and rules. Most of our ancestors had to make the leap out of their comfort zones, and I will not think of any new immigrant quite the same after reading this astonishing book. I needed my own copy right away. It is a wonder.
Leslie Lindbergh Jones
Book Review: Extraordinary! Nothing Else Like It!
Summary: 5 Stars
Shaun Tan's The Arrival may be the most beautiful book I've ever seen. The Arrival is a 128 page picture book that tells the story of an immigrant. It could be the story of any immigrant going to any new land, but it happens to be the story of a man heading off to a bizarre yet beautiful world that is so unfamiliar to anything that we know of today to set up a home for his wife and child. The food, the creatures, the jobs, the way of life, the way of travel...it's all new and bizarre and told beautifully through Tan's haunting, sepia toned artwork. Each villager that he meets has their own story of how they came to the land and what they left behind. What Tan presents is an homage to every migrant that's ever traveled to a new world and set up a new life for themselves. The story is told through pictures only - no words, and no words are needed. This is a beautiful book and I can't help but feel that every family should have a copy on their bookshelf.Book Review: Amazing illustrator
Summary: 5 Stars
I've been a fan of Shaun Tan for a while. He's so versatile in his adoption of styles, but always with a strong foundation in representational skills. This graphic novel might take a bit more time to read because of the lack of words, but once I sat down with it, the story flows easily from panel to panel. And the tight pencil rendering is just drop-dead gorgeous. It is strange to me that he was a Fine Arts major because he does such a great job at being a visual storyteller. He has such wonderful imagination filled with magical worlds and creatures that are all uniquely his.
Story-wise, it is a gentle tale of a stranger's hardships in a new place. People who've never been out of their country might not be able to feel just how disorienting and lonely it is. Shaun Tan shows in a simple way some of the difficulties such a stranger might encounter, without implicating any known races or groups of people and thus make the story more accessible.
Book Review: Simply Wonderful
Summary: 5 Stars
You always hear tales from your family about the isolation of being an immigrant. How it feels to enter a new country where you don't know what is written on the signs around you, what is considered food, how to greet a stranger. "Arrival" places the immigrant's experience into something tangible for both children and adults. You will understand, or at least have an idea, of what it feels like to flee a home that is full of danger and take a chance on a new world - building a life for the family you miss and eventually bring over. And there are no undertones about what country this one represents - it is not the U.S. or England, but a developed and intellectual country that, for whatever reason, has opened its doors to anyone who seeks freedom. It is a parable for our times, one that can change our minds about what it means to take a chance on strangers, and find kindness and hope in return.
Simply wonderful. Thank you, Mr. Tan.
Book Review: Persuasive, beautiful
Summary: 5 Stars
Shaun Tan's "The Arrival" is a story told without any conventional text. The beautifully drawn and detailed sepia pictures move from the grand scale of strangely geometrical cityscapes to the intimacy of a close-up in a single frame. The story is that of a man with a family who leaves them to look for work in a new country and his experiences there. Whether or not the author's "argument" is literally true (is it, for example, a romanticised interpretation of immigration?) the encounters and incidents that the man meets with are convincing because they represent certain common experiences that anybody who has ever travelled to a strange land will understand instantly. In that sense it has tremendous power to appeal to a broad range of readers. Moreover, it is at heart a deeply optimistic book. Readers of different ages will extract different things from this gentle book but it is suitable for readers of all levels and cultures.