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Lost & Found | October 26, 2011

by Shaun Tan (Scholastic, Mar. 2011)

Lost & Found by Shaun Tan has been sitting on my desk for the past month or so, patiently awaiting my attention. As a huge fan of The Arrival and Tales From Outer Suburbia, I knew this book deserved a quiet, solitary read. So I took it home last night and finished it in one sitting. It’s difficult to say what, exactly, makes each of the three stories in this book perfect. But I think it is their strangeness. At first glance, the images hover on the edge of being incomprehensible. Then the words and art give way to just enough meaning that you feel the story is getting at something essential and true, but you can’t quite put your finger on what it is. “The Red Tree” is about a little girl who feels lost, alone, disappointed, confused, and–worst of all–hopeless, until a tiny spark of joy transforms her world into something beautiful. “The Lost Thing” (fun fact: Tan won an Oscar for an animated short of this story), is about a boy who finds a creature that quite clearly does not belong where it is. Instead of abandoning the thing, he protects it and cares for it until he finds its true home. “The Rabbits” (illustrated by Tan, written by John Marsden), is a quietly devastating allegory about the suffering of a colonized people. I’m still mulling over what this book meant to me, but I think it could mean something entirely different to YOU. So read it!

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