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Tuesday, 10 February 2015

The Arrival by Shaun Tan (review)

I am very much a list oriented kind of person. When I write a list, it gives me great satisfaction to cross something off that list. So yeah, when I wrote this Top Ten Tuesday post, I made it my mission to read most of the books on that list. I've gotten through 4/10 of the books on that list! Go me!! Woooo!!!

Today I'm only going to review one book.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan

Title: The Arrival
Author: Shaun Tan
Date published: 12 October 2007
My rating: 5/5 stars


*This review will contain spoilers. However, in the case of this book I don't think the spoilers I mention will detract from your enjoyment of the book nor are they very 'spoiler-y'. 

I love this book. I really do love this book. I want to show this book to every single human being on the planet. This graphic novel has no words, it's told entirely in pictures so language won't be a problem -you just have to be able to read facial expressions! If you're not very good at reading facial expressions, then I will explain the whole thing to you!!! 

Every single picture in this book is beautifully illustrated, take your time to look at each drawing. The book has a very vintage feel to it. The drawings all have a slight yellow tint to it reminiscence of old photographs.

This book affected me emotionally. My parents are immigrant as I mentioned in the aforementioned Top Ten Tuesday post. To a certain extent I am also an immigrant because I wasn't born in Australia but I'm young and malleable, I adapted with a lot more ease than my parents. I don't quite understand the hardship they went through and my parents aren't particularly keen on sharing. I don't resent them for that at all! But this book did help me understand them a little bit more; the struggle of leaving your family behind for a country where they screen you and ask you personal questions, a completely reasonable thing to do but does leave a person feeling emotionally and mentally drained; the struggle of experiencing a whole new culture -new food, new language, new everything; the struggle of finding a job; the struggle of missing your family.

Being an immigrant is hard which is the number one reason I want everyone to read this book -so they realise just how hard it is and that they'll be nicer to them. I want to punch every single person who rolls their eyes and gives an exaggerated exasperated sigh when talking to someone whose first language obviously isn't English.

However, being an immigrant isn't all bad as Tan reminds us. There are good people you meet along the way. People who invite you to dinner, who open up their family to you. People who tell you stories of their life and what they've been through and why they too left their country just like you did. The best feeling of all has to be being reunited with your family. Tan captures this emotion or should I say, emotions, perfectly. 

So pick up this graphic novel. It's a short read, it's all pictures but I guarantee that those illustrations will stir something deep within you. It's a story about immigrants that everybody, immigrant or not, will be able to relate to as the world Tan depicts is familiar yet strange. 


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