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Manufacturer: Arthur A. Levine Books
Average Customer Rating:
Binding: Hardcover EAN: 9780439895293 ISBN: 0439895294 Label: Arthur A. Levine Books Manufacturer: Arthur A. Levine Books Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 128 Publication Date: 2007-10-01 Publisher: Arthur A. Levine Books Reading Level: Ages 9-12 Studio: Arthur A. Levine Books
"A shockingly imaginative graphic novel that captures the sense of adventure and wonder that surrounds a new arrival on the shores of a shining new city. Wordless, but with perfect narrative flow, Tan gives us a story filled with cityscapes worthy of Winsor McCay." -- Jeff Smith, author of Bone
"A magical river of strangers and their stories!" -- Craig Thompson, author of Blankets
"Magnificent." -- David Small, Caldecott Medalist
In a heartbreaking parting, a man gives his wife and daughter a last kiss and boards a steamship to cross the ocean. He's embarking on the most painful yet important journey of his life - he's leaving home to build a better future for his family. Shaun Tan evokes universal aspects of an immigrant's experience through a singular work of the imagination. He does so using brilliantly clear and mesmerizing images. Because the main character can't communicate in words, the book forgoes them too. But while the reader experiences the main character's isolation, he also shares his ultimate joy.
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating: Summary: An amazing book and more! Comment: Saying that it is an amazing book would be selling it short! Like all fine works of art it is to be cherished. Go grab a copy and 'see' it if you haven't or even if you have! Customer Rating: Summary: The plight of the immigrant in graphic novel form Comment: This book tells the story of a man who leaves his home and family and comes to start a new life for them all in an alien culture. Because The Arrival is a graphic novel that takes as it's setting an imaginary land with a unique language, the reader is able to enter the world as the protagonist does, completely at the mercy of the world he's trying to call home. The fine and suggestive illustrations allow the reader to experience the confusion, isolation, terror and wonder of this journey. This book helped me to appreciate the struggles my own ancestors, and everyone else in America's ancestors, must have faced in their passage of immigration. I also found a new compassion for those future citizens hoping to live within our borders, whose difficulties and challenges they must face daily. In California you meet so many different nationalities, so many people trying to make a new life for themselves and their families, and they're doing it for the most part with dignity and purpose, starting with the simple desire to begin again in a land of opportunity. The Arrival depicts this ambition with genuine sincerity and truth. I highly recommend it. Customer Rating: Summary: Perfect. Comment: Shaun Tan, The Arrival (Arthur A. Levine, 2007)
There's a single panel, towards the end of Chapter 2 of Shaun Tan's remarkable graphic novel The Arrival, that sums up a great deal of what you need to know about the book. Previously, a man has left his wife and daughter behind to emigrate to a new land, where everything is unfamiliar to him. When, despite the cultural and language barriers he faces, he manages to find lodging, he pulls out his suitcase and opens it. Instead of the things he packed, what we see is his wife and daughter, sitting and eating a meal alone in the house he used to share with them. Everything about the scene is rendered in exquisite detail, and it's a perfect synecdoche for Tan's approach to his material here; the fabulist attitude laced with a hefty dollop of surrealism, the feel of how it is to be a stranger in a strange land, and Tan's sure hand with his illustrations, right down to the way he gives us the kind of cracking you see on old photographs.
As our nameless protagonist journeys through the city, he meets other immigrants, and he assimilates culturally by listening to their own stories of what it was like to emigrate from their homelands to this wonderful city where all of them have ended up. Tan tells a universal-- clichéd, perhaps-- story in such a unique way that I would think it impossible not to be charmed. This is fine, fine work indeed, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. You need to read this book. *****
Customer Rating: Summary: best anti-xenophobe book ever Comment: The book takes a bit of struggle to read .... because there are no words. There are no words because the subject of the book doesn't read the language. You are equal to him in your understanding of the language of the book's writing. All is strange and magical, foreign and familiar. The one constant in the book is that people are people, always and everywhere.
Buy it, read it, share it with your friends. Customer Rating: Summary: Beautiful - both story and drawings Comment: This graphical comic is just beautiful. The story and metaphor are beautiful, as well as the drawings .. actually the drawings are uncredibly well done and each of them (even the less significant ones) could be used as prints. I was expecting to be a bit bored, since there is no text, but honestly no text is needed and the drawings say it all.
Higly recommended!!!!
