People live and work in plate and cone-shaped structures, traveling via dirigibles and strange ship-shaped machinations of flight. Appliances consist of confusing pulls and toggles. The reader of this book sympathizes easily with the man since author/illustrator Shaun Tan has created a world that is just as odd to us as it is to our protagonist.
Everything from the language to the buildings to the birds is strange here. Once he arrives, however, he finds himself at a loss. Tearfully they let him go as he boards a ship for another land. My review back in the day of it said this about the plot: “A man prepares to leave his family for a new world. I hereby proclaim that until someone can pin down a definite genre for a book as amazing, miraculous, and downright fun as The Arrival, here it shall remain on this Top 100 Books poll. Yet it does break itself into panels quite often… but can’t the same be said of many picture books, like The Adventures of Polo and the like? Is there an age limit to it? Maybe (there are some scary scenes) but when do children stop reading picture books? Many read them for years, though often on the sly when around peers or siblings.
You might call it a graphic novel too, except it eschews thought bubbles and speech balloons. It tells a story entirely with pictures and not a single word (or, at least, not a single word we can understand). So is it a picture book? Well, let’s see. There’s no question it belongs on this list. – Aaron Zenzīecause it’s a richly imagined, beautifully rendered, wordless graphic narrative of immigration, dislocation, and hope. It doesn’t just “tell” an immigrant’s story, it magically (or I suppose, skillfully) brings us INTO the very experience.
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