Crenshaw's Books & Decks

This is a short story about a cicada who works in a  human corporate building, and feels mistreated and unappreciated.

The way the story is painted and the main character are an example of Tan's artistic mastery.  I love the grey and green main tones of the story, the wondrous Etcher-like settings, and the awesome atmosphere, something that looks effortlessly easy because Tan is a genius at what he does.  The precision of his drawing pen and the artistry of his paintings are totally awesome, as well as his chiaroscuro work. The book has a cinematic feeling to me, too.

The story, though, is simplistic, which is understandable as the target readers are both children and adults.  As an adult who has read almost everything published by Tan, I feel that the story is a bit sketchy and might not resonate with everyone. That's my case. Yes, for sure I can get the story lesson. I'm sure that it will help children and adults see that one can always escape oppressive circumstances, people and settings and fly away, choose how one lives; however, the way the story is narrated feels a bit lacking to me. Put it differently, the book feels more like a sketch of a story to be further developed than a round story.

I love everything that Tan draws and paints, and buy almost everything he publishes, but the storytelling here feels a bit hurried up and not polished enough to me.

Tales from Outer Suburbia is perhaps the most Australian of Tan's books, and definitely very Western Australian. Tan is native from the northern suburbs of Perth WA, and the landscapes, urban furniture and fauna he depicts are just part of Perth's visual idiosyncrasy.

This book is atypical, in two ways. Firstly, Tan, usually very concise in the wording of his books and in the use of words in them, writes a lot in here, and the text is as important as the images. This is so, because this is a semi-memoir of Tan's childhood, and the stories part of his emotional memory growing up in Perth. Secondly, visually speaking, this book is eclectic in styles, because he he uses very different illustration and painting techniques and styles to accompany the different stories, which remind the reader of the ones used in his previous books. In that regard, the book is less congruent visually than his previous ones.

What is still typical of Tan is his mastery at drawing, its ability to create magic realism from the quotidian, to create visually appealing almost-touchable images, absurd meaningful scenes, and quirky funny adorable characters. I love the way he uses his images to create mock newspapers news, mock Post envelopes, mock wall-collages, how he incorporate the credits and acknowledgements in a borrowing slip library card or an envelop, his mock postage stamps, the quirky funny magical sketches that cover the inner front and back covers of the book.  

Some of his usual themes are also here, especially the concepts of foreign (how foreigners see us, how we see foreigners, what  foreign is) and of how our childhood memories never fade out in our hearts, no matter how mundane they were, because the way we lived and perceived them. 

 

The stories or chapters in the book are:
>> The Water Buffalo.
>> Eric (this is one of my favourite in drawing style and message -very similar to the Arrival- and because Eric is just the bomb!)
>> Broken Toys.
>> Undertow.
>> Grandpa's Story (Another favourite because of the narrative, and how Tan turns a real story into something really magical).
>> The other country (Because it depicts his contact with the Mediterranean culture and the magic in it. The painting is also very Mediterranean!)
>> Stick Figures (I love the visuals of this one because it depicts Perth summer landscape very well).
>> The Nameless Holiday.
>> Alert but not alarmed
>> Wake.
>> Make your Own Pet.
>> Our Expedition.
>> Night of the Turtle Rescue

To be honest, every story is wonderful.

This is a melancholic book about Tan's emotional landscapes, so it has to be read as such.

A lonely girl is in search of herself, lost without hope, and has to deal with herself and her demons to find happiness.

The Red Tree is an Ode to hope, to expect always the best, even in our darkest moments. A visual song about self-acceptance and about accepting life with its lows and highs. A book with very few words that, however, conveys deep emotions: sadness, loneliness, doubt, struggle, isolation, hope, happiness and triumph. The reader connects immediately with the little girl character because any of us has had in the past some of those emotions or feelings. We get this sense of oneness with the little girl, and feel victory with her when she finds her red tree.

This is one of this books that I re-read and peruse when I feel sad, when I feel stuck, when I want to remember that there is always hope, and life is full of surprises around the corner.

Some children's books are forever, Universal, and full of unspoken poetry. This is one of them.

The Rabbits is a children's book fit for adults. First published in 1998, it is still as fresh as the day it came out.

The Rabbits is a metaphorical story on the colonisation of Australia as seen and perceived by the original inhabitants of the land. The rabbits represent the European arriving in Australia, and the Wallabies the Aborigines. Shaun Tan's illustrations are wondrous, as always, but also moody and dramatic, very beautiful and powerful in the portray of the beauty of this land, the mind of the newly arrived, and the way Nature was examined and transformed. Even the attitudes of the Europeans and the Aborigines are shown in the way they dress, look and move.

This is one of those books that should be compulsory in schools to teach Australian children the basics of the History of this country - that version that we miss from History books because those have been done from an Eurocentric point of view, not by those who were dominated. For the indigenous people colonisation is an euphemism of the destruction that they suffered. However, it is remarkable that the book is written by two non-indigenous people - it is daring today, so you can imagine how daring and controversial was 14 years ago.

Reconciliation is not just a flashy word used by politicians, it is a process of becoming acquainted with our past and giving voice to those who never had it despite being part of it. This book does just so in a very unpretentious beautiful way. The book also offers and environmental message of respect and understanding of the land as a basis to benefit from it.

This is also one of those books that needs parenting - you and you child side by side, the adult not only as reader, but also as inductor and teacher. A book that needs to be talked and discussed about, so your children grow to form a country that has a different mentality and attitude towards its History and towards Aborigines.

The Rabbits is one of my favourite Australian books of all times. So tiny, so simple and so profound. So daring in its few colourful pages.

The arrival is a must for any graphic book lover, a wondrous piece of Art that engages the reader from the very cover.

There are many reasons why I consider this a jewel and a must have. The first one, is the quality of Tan's drawings and artistry. Each page, each image, each vignette is a masterpiece of its own regarding technique, detail and creativity. The drawings and images are drawn with a chilling beautiful virtuosity. The illustration is done in a very warm dark-brown and cream duotone, which conveys the overall faux-vintage feeling of the book.

The second one is the fact that the book has a narrative that is universal in nature that uses multiracial characters and alien beings (the tiny monsters). I think it can be understood no matter your culture of origin. The images convey meaning with the need of any word being uttered. Tan does so in a masterly way.

The third is the story itself. This is a story of immigration and challenges in a new foreign land. A story that million of people have lived, are living and will live. I am an immigrant, so the book directly speaks to me. Many of the images reminded me of the early 1920-1950s when million of emigrated from Europe to the States or Australia. Tan's land of arrival is incomprehensible and mysterious. The story is universal because Tan has the ability of distilling real immigration stories and experiences into something that is full of meaning, respects the reality that immigrants face but is full of hope, and shows well how the arrival is also a process of inner transformation and learning to relate in different ways.

The fourth is the wondrous mix of real and surreal elements in the story in a very functional way. This is Tan's speciality and he does so with great easiness and mastery. Tan creates wonderful magic creatures that interact with humans with normality, and vice versa, as if the world was an harmonious mismatch of all sort of beings.

I truly love this book. I don't get tired of it. I revisit it often. Wonderful.

I hurried up to my local bookshop to buy this book as soon as it came out, as there were some autographed stickers and a bag given as a token, and I am a fan of Tan's artwork.

Rules of Summer is a book about the summer in the life of two young boys. Tan depicts what a summer feels, underline feels, to these two kids. The illustrations are not about what they did or what happened to them, although that is also clear in some of them, but is more about how these kids felt and interpreted what happened to them, and what the highlights of their summer in their memories were. If you depart from this principle, the book immediately makes sense and the narrative pops up. For example, this is perfectly clear in the images associated to: "Never eat the last olive at a party" and "never leave the back door open overnight". The rest of the illustrations work in a similar way, but some of them are more difficult to understand or decipher than others.

The images in the book are wonderfully painted, with Tan's great sense of lighting, chiaroscuro and colour, and the use of the same to create wonderfully simply but evocative atmospheric images that require little words to be appreciated. The landscape of his native Perth WA is perfectly captured in this book: blind white light, quiet neighbourhoods, over-present crows, the always crooked power lines, among others, which are incorporated into his wondrous magic world.

I love everything that Tan does, but this is, perhaps, his less inspired book. My opinion. It is still wonderful, but way too short and not as original or fulfilling, to me