Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan

1. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Tan, Shaun. Tales from Outer Suburbia. New York: Scholastic Press, 2008.

2. PLOT SUMMARY

From Shaun Tan's website: "Tales from Outer Suburbia is an anthology of fifteen very short illustrated stories. Each one is about a strange situation or event that occurs in an otherwise familiar suburban world; a visit from a nut-sized foreign exchange student, a sea creature on someone’s front lawn, a new room discovered in a family home, a sinister machine installed in a park, a wise buffalo that lives in a vacant lot. The real subject of each story is how ordinary people react to these incidents, and how their significance is discovered, ignored or simply misunderstood."


3. CRITICAL ANALYSIS

There is not one central character in the book. Each story has a unique and distinct character. The illustrations are dark. The creepy and strange artwork supports the text in aiding with the imagination of this surreal world. The pictures are humorous and otherworldly. The graphic novel is not what I expected. My impression of a graphic novel is an extremely long comic book. This book is more like a grown up picture book than a comic book. The text passages are not short paragraphs, but complete fantasy short stories that can span a few pages with pictures there to aid in the storytelling.


4. REVIEW EXCERPTS

 Ditmar Award for Best Artwork 2009

Matt Berman from Common Sense Media: "And now for something completely different -- again. With his previous book, The Arrival, author/illustrator created something new: a wordless graphic novel dense with visual metaphor."

David Fickling from The Guardian: "It's an extraordinary image, surprising yet inevitable, resonant with all sorts of metaphorical possibilities. And yet it's beautifully grounded in the rivalry of sibling hood, in which winning or losing an argument with your brother counts for more than discovering that the world really is flat after all. That kind of moment is what Shaun Tan excels at, and that's what makes this collection so charming, and so memorable."


5. CONNECTIONS

Other Books by Shaun Tan:
The Playground    ISBN 9783037644546
The Lost Thing     ISBN 978171632354
The Red Tree     ISBN 9780734401724
The Arrival     ISBN 9780439895293

Lesson Plans:The publisher, Scholastic Inc., has a great resource lesson plans. All of the plans located on this site are for 6th grade students and up. Find it here: Scholastic Plan