Review by New York Times Review
WHEN SHAUN tan won a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award in 2008 for "The Arrival," the judges despaired of figuring out a category (picture book? fiction?) for its 128 wordless pages of sepia images. They awarded it a "special citation," affirming its general weirdness and the genre-busting nature of its format, but mainly its remarkable, metaphor-made-concrete evocation of the stranger in a strange land, a man negotiating a new landscape, new people, new pets, all without the benefit of knowing the language. What's it like to be plunked down in a world of general weirdness? That's the question that drives the Australian author-illustrator Tan, who in 2011 won the lucrative (500,000 euros!) international Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. He asks the question soberly, laconically, in tales from THE INNER CITY (Arthur A. Levine/ Scholastic, 219 pp., $24.99; ages 10 and up), a collection of 25 illustrated prose poems and short stories about the relations of animals and people. In "Shark" - the table of contents page is simply a spread of animal silhouettes with numbers on them, so I'm approximating here - the townspeople have gathered in celebration of the capture and slaughter of their monstrous finned foe, only to discover that each slice of the fisherman's blade reveals more sharks, "spilling out like Russian dolls, smaller and smaller, hundreds, thousands, each unborn generation as fresh and blue as water before they rolled out into the blood and gore of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents." "Moonfish" imagines a dystopia in which the only unpollutedenough element left for the fish is the sky. "Lungfish" portrays the species evolving to colonize a city in a way its human inhabitants never quite managed. While all the scenarios are original and vivid, the stories tend toward the brief and cryptic (one is about giant snails found "making love right then and there" in the streets) or the overlong and overwritten (some of the sentences in "Shark" clock in at more than 75 words). But the prose isn't why you're here. What you came for are the pictures. Each story gets at least one, a wordless, full-bleed double-page spread that illustrates, extravagantly, either a large motif or an offhand moment from its story in richly textured paint. Those snails kiss under the noir glow of sodium vapor streetlights while a hooded guitarist serenades them from the subway below. A sweet (if wordy) tale of the death of a beloved cat shows him giant-size, carrying his vulnerable human family between his ears as he keeps them afloat in a raging sea. A tormented young genius dreams only of hippos; the pictured hippo shifts from ourworld gray to all the colors of the universe in the boy's imagination. The centerpiece of the collection (at least, for the dog lovers among us) is a prose poem dramatized by 13 paintings of dog-andhuman pairs, meditating on the dependence that grew between the species in prehistory and into modern times, the I-thou bond of each pair a constant: "One day I threw my stick at you. / You brought it back. / My hand touched your ear. / Your nose touched the back of my knee." In the first painting in the sequence, a man with a spear faces a gray dog across a wide diagonal void; as the pages continue, the man and dog walk together, the void becomes a river, a road, a forest, battlefield, a highway, the man becomes a woman, a soldier, a different woman, and the dog changes breeds, any- and everydog, a dog for all times and seasons. It's a tour de force. The poem, as throughout the volume, gets world-weary ("It feels like time is only ever running away from us") in a way that perhaps doesn't speak directly to the children and teenagers who will be drawn to the pictures. But what pictures they are, each one in this book - horses at the end of the freeway, an orca plane-high above the sprawling city lights - an invitation to tell a story to yourself. Do. ROGER SUTTON is the editor in chief of The Horn Book.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 11, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Our relationships with animals have always been complicated, becoming more so as our landscape is increasingly urban. In Tan's hands, the city is a place where the wondrous and mundane lives of animals and humans collide, exposing all our flaws and potential and how deeply animals and nature affect us. Initially, these stories seem born of magic and whimsy, but they are deeply rooted in reality: a mother orca grieves for her calf after it is placed in the sky; the last rhino inconveniences drivers as it wanders onto a busy freeway; and an energetic fox paws through both your house and your dreams. While the stories are unexpected and thought-provoking, the illustrations are what really make this book shine. Painted in oil and acrylic on canvas, they are arrestingly luminous. Glowing cityscapes and empty streets create dreamlike backdrops for unexpected juxtapositions that range from serene to unsettling, conveying a sense of wonder, danger, and loss. Beautiful and strange, this collection is unique in both vision and execution.--Summer Hayes Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Like its predecessor, Tales from Outer Suburbia, these short stories by Tan imagine a collection of alternate worlds; here, they chronicle the lives of animals who dwell cheek by jowl with humans amid urban sprawl. Tan's skill as a writer provides sturdy scaffolding for a seemingly endless stream of startling ideas. Crocodiles live on the 87th floor of an office building. Lungfish assemble in subway stations. Massive snails make love on city streets. Bears sue humans, not just for murder and genocide, but for crimes under the bear legal code: "Spiritual Exclusion, Groaking, and Ungungunurumunre." Sometimes, the animals face extinction; almost always-and especially in the gorgeous, haunting paintings-they display dignity and power that the book's humans lack. In one series of images, a snowy owl superintends a hospital patient, its magnificent golden eyes gleaming impassively from the bed railing. Elsewhere, a fox hangs poised in midair above a sleeping man, ready to pounce: "Your four-digit codes and firewalls.... None of it can keep me out!" In these uneasy, strange visions, moments of beauty, and even a bleak, futurological kind of joy, abides. Ages 12-up. (Sept.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 7 Up-As with most of Tan's books, this wonderfully eclectic and insightful follow-up to Tales of Outer Suburbia defies categorization. It is at once an art book, a collection of short stories, and an allegorical treatise on modern urban life, using various wild and domestic animals and their relationships with humankind as their focal point. The book opens with a spread of 25 silhouettes of various creatures highlighted within. The individual selections range from a couple of paragraphs to 10 pages or so, and each includes at least one glorious, two-page painting. The captivating stories are by turns smart, funny, tragic, wry, and often wise, if a bit trippy. Whether it's frogs in a board room, rhinos on the freeway, bears heavily lawyered-up for days in court, or orcas in the sky, these seemingly surreal scenarios allow readers to explore the behaviors of humankind and speculate about its possible future in the grand scheme of things. The 7 x 9-inch hardcover trim size may limit the audience of middle schoolers, but this is a volume to hold onto, dip into, reflect on, and interact with, providing limitless writing, art, and discussion prompts. VERDICT This is a thoughtful and inviting examination of some big questions, without professing to have all the answers. A distinctive artistic achievement that will be welcome in most libraries.-Luann Toth, School Library Journal © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
With these works of beguiling short fiction set in a reality (or realities) other than our own, Tan (Tales from Outer Suburbia, rev. 3/09; The Singing Bones, rev. 9/16) here explores the concept of the tenuous relationship between humans and animals within urban landscapes. Each of the twenty-five stories focuses on a particular animal, introduced to readers using silhouettes on a visual table of contents. Most stories are confined to three to five pages of evocative prose capped by an illustration in Tans uniquely earthy and luminescent color palette; an eight-line poem lamenting the shooting of the last rhinoceros (on the freeway) is an exception. A nearly forty-page meditation on the symbiotic bond between dogs and humans consists of mostly wordless double-page spreads containing bursts of emotive verse. The most extensive piece of writing follows a family as they successfully hook a moonfish out of the sky, fillet it, and then fail to secure a black-market saleand it is a masterwork of short-form world-building. The connotations behind individual stories range from fairly overt (bears suing humans for crimes against the natural world) to rather oblique (a classroom teachers obsessive demand to respect the sheep!); regardless, Tans painterly illustrations consistently enhance each narrative. patrick gall (c) Copyright 2018. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In contrast to the neighborhood settings of Tales from Outer Suburbia (2009), this collection of 25 illustrated poems and stories explores the dynamics between animals and humans amid breathtakingly imaginative scenes in skyscrapers and gutters.Evocative openings compel continued reading: "One afternoon the members of the board all turned into frogs." Exploiting the double meaning of the titular "inner," Tan's (TheSinging Bones, 2016, etc.) ideas are dressed in elegant language that creates the particular within cosmic constructs varying in length, voice, and mood. A horror story about a monster shark finally thwartedonly to keep reproducingis less terrifying in the first-person plural. The intimate second-person transforms the reader into a toddler communing with wondrous spirit horses in a car's back seat. His consistent ability to delight the mind with fresh theater yields both provocation and restoration. When dead waterways bring about fishing in sky currents, an elusive catch leads a group of boys to experience the relationship between quick decay and fleeting value; yet, as the discovered roe are released heavenward, "here it was, the third great gift of the moonfish: an upward shower of golden sparks, a benediction of transcendental caviar, and remorse." The paintings within or concluding each tale are characterized by layers of glorious color, shadowy corners, dazzling luminosity, surreal situations, and ethereal beauty. They invite lingering, wondering: Ultimately, who will have the last wordor is there another question?Read and reread slowly, savoring every nugget. (Fiction. 12-adult) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
