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A review by xterminal
The Red Tree by Shaun Tan
4.0
Shaun Tan, The Red Tree (Simply Read Books, 2001)
Shaun Tan, in his twenties, became one of the faces of the revival of the graphic novel; The Arrival garnered any number of awards, got starred reviews from the review publications, made the New York Times Notable Books list... you get the idea. But back when Tan was still in his teens, he was already publishing in his native Australia, and America had no clue. To this day, we still don't; Simply Read Books, who picked him up back in 2001, are a Canadian imprint. (A compendium of three of Tan's early tales, including The Red Tree, is finally being released on American shores in April 2011 by Arthur A. Levine.) While none of these early books that I've reviewed (with the arguable exception of The Rabbits) comes close to the power of The Arrival or its follow-up, Tales from Outer Suburbia, they are valuable both as indications of where Tan would eventually end up and as the originators of some of Tan's visual obsessions that persist to this day. The illustrations in The Red Tree contain blueprints for some of the things that, fully matured, would show up in The Arrival and Tales from Outer Suburbia, and the pleasure of reading this book with ten years of hindsight is seeing how Tan progressed from point A to point B. ****
Shaun Tan, in his twenties, became one of the faces of the revival of the graphic novel; The Arrival garnered any number of awards, got starred reviews from the review publications, made the New York Times Notable Books list... you get the idea. But back when Tan was still in his teens, he was already publishing in his native Australia, and America had no clue. To this day, we still don't; Simply Read Books, who picked him up back in 2001, are a Canadian imprint. (A compendium of three of Tan's early tales, including The Red Tree, is finally being released on American shores in April 2011 by Arthur A. Levine.) While none of these early books that I've reviewed (with the arguable exception of The Rabbits) comes close to the power of The Arrival or its follow-up, Tales from Outer Suburbia, they are valuable both as indications of where Tan would eventually end up and as the originators of some of Tan's visual obsessions that persist to this day. The illustrations in The Red Tree contain blueprints for some of the things that, fully matured, would show up in The Arrival and Tales from Outer Suburbia, and the pleasure of reading this book with ten years of hindsight is seeing how Tan progressed from point A to point B. ****