Week 1 - The Arrival
Shaun Tan's The Arrival is a beautifully illustrated story tackling themes of immigration, isolation and adapting to a foreign landscape. There have been multiple published stories out there that tell the story of an immigrant trying to fit into a new society, but very few are as inventive as this one. I knew this was going to be something special very early on when my expectations were immediately subverted within the first few pages. When the protagonist leaves his family, we start as if it were an ordinary story with ordinary people characters. However, the moment they step outside of their home, everything changes. We see their world featuring rough, scribbled, broken homes along with mysterious spiked silhouettes that give the impression of instability and possibly danger. This is where I started to wonder, "where could this story be going?" Fast forward to the scene where our protagonist steps off the ship, my immediate thought is that we were going to see the St