The Arrival
by Shaun Tan
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Book Reviews of The Arrival
Book Review: Surreal, but Familiar
Summary: 5 Stars
Shaun Tan's "The Arrival" is an enormously engaging book that captures solely through illustration, the pathos, despair, joy, longing and tenderness of leaving one's country and family to come to a new land. In this new land of fantasy architecture, peculiar pets and wonderfully bizarre foods, the protagonist discovers many friends who give him comfort and share their knowledge with him. In an underlying theme, the reader experiences the tension of political upheaval and conflict through Tan's evocative presentation of chaos, war and armies on the march. Especially to be treasured and pondered over are the wonderfully drawn, ethnically diverse faces that the artist portrays on the book's endpapers. Even traversing the surreal landscape and environment Tan creates, it is easy to feel that is as familiar as a dream.,Book Review: This book evokes the immigrant experience
Summary: 5 Stars
The Arrival
In this wordless graphic novel, through magnificent illustrations, Tan captures the disorientation immigrants may feel toward their new surroundings. It depicts the journey of one man who seems both accepted and rejected by his new country. The only writing is in an invented alphabet, which motivates the viewer to feel confused just like the immigrants must feel when they encounter a strange new language and way of life. A feeling of tolerance and acceptance is presented throughout the story and transcends race and ethnicity. The youngest readers and the most sophisticated will find this book interesting. This book is an excellent conversation starter in any mainstream or ESL classroom.
Book Review: The best picture book you'll ever own
Summary: 5 Stars
This book has
- no words
- amazing pictures
- emotional depth
- magical settings
- terrible monsters
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This is a book everyone can relate to - we've all felt like outsiders at some point in our lives. At 128 pages, it takes only 30 minutes to 'read' before you'll want to go over it again more slowly in detail.
It is the tale of a man leaving his family for a distant foreign land and facing all the strange things there, unable to speak the language, understand the food, the animals, the people, the rules.
Every time I've shown this book to friends, I've eventually had to prize it out of their hands as they pour over the detailed drawings, tears welling up at the beautiful story.
You'll never get tired of it.
Book Review: A fascinating and beautiful investigation of life in a new world
Summary: 4 Stars
A man leaves his wife and child behind to prepare a life for them in a new land. He faces strange customs and a strange language in a strange world. Gradually, he is able to find work and make friends among other newcomers, who have their own stories to tell of why they had to leave their home countries.
How do you depict the strangeness and wonder of a new place without words? Shaun Tan's "The Arrival" is an astonishing and surreal depiction of the immigrant experience, of what it is like to experience the wonder and fear and danger of a new place. The incredibly detailed illustrations, that suggest early twentieth century photos, are evocative and powerful, full of fantasy but at the same time vividly suggestive of real experience. A very exciting graphic novel.
Book Review: Wondrous.
Summary: 5 Stars
More often than not, wordless comics somehow inspire the reader to move faster rather than slow down and enjoy the view. Shaun Tan's sumptuously detailed drawings in THE ARRIVAL work to the opposite. I found myself holding the book out from my body so I could enjoy the images in full, lingering on a page or a sequence of panels and letting the enormity of the small moments the artist captures sink in and take effect.
This incredible book recasts the Ellis Island experience as a journey to a phantasmagorical land of strange languages, machines, and creatures, creating a delightful visual metaphor for the alien wonders of a new world, even when that world is part of our own, separated from us only by an ocean.
THE ARRIVAL is a stirring picture book of the best kind.