(New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2009)
Hardcover, 96 Pages, Children’s Short Fiction Anthology
ABCD Rating: BACKLIST
From the Cover: You thought you knew suburbia… Then you meet an exchange student from another world, discover a secret room that lets you escape to a place of perfect beauty, find a neighborhood where brightly painted missiles decorate every yard, and wait for a blind reindeer who demands a very special offering. … These are the odd, magical details of everyday suburban life the might forever go unnoticed, were they not finally brought to life by Shaun Tan, author and illustrator of award-winning New York Times bestseller The Arrival. Outer Suburbia. It’s closer than you think.
This collection contains the following stories: “The Water Buffalo,” “Eric,” “Broken Toys,” “Distant Rain,” “Undertow,” “Grandpa’s Story,” “No Other Country,” “Stick Figures,” “The Nameless Holiday,” “The Amnesia Machine,” “Alert But Not Alarmed,” “Wake,” “Why Not Make Your Own Pet: Here’s How,” “Our Expedition,” and “Night of the Turtle Rescue.”
My Review: It seems that a lot of books follow the same pattern for me: I am on my way out of the library and a book leaps off the shelf and into my bag. Tales from Outer Suburbia is one of those books. We were in the children’s section of our local library and I was at the self-check out and after running the books under the scanner, turned to go and I was confronted by the blank staring face of a diver’s helmet boring in to me from an endcap display. Compelled, I had to pick it up.
It sat, forgotten, amongst our library books for about a week before I finally saw it again (which seems strangely appropriate given the “found” nature of the stories in the book). I picked it up and started flipping through it and was instantly arrested by not only the artwork (which is absolutely incredible) but the stories are so … odd … that I cannot even begin to describe them. (Not good for a book review, I know, but it’s the honest truth.) I started reading them at bedtime and everybody fell in love with them. My wife and I loved the stories and my son and daughter loved the artwork.
So, as for the stories … they are so absolutely surreal that you need to experience them to fully appreciate them: a water buffalo that will point you in the right direction, what happens to all the poetry people write but don’t publish, a strange vigil of dogs, and … in my favorite … the eerie watchfulness of the “Stick Figures.” What Tan has created in Tales from Outer Suburbia is nothing short of astounding. He has taken the ennui and utter blandness of suburban life and turned it on its head; found the magical in the mundane, so to speak. This suburban landscape is still populated with cookie-cutter tract houses, and chain stores and fast food strip malls, but the vacant lot houses a water buffalo. Childhood adventures with a street map are elevated to the stature of expedition, and “keeping up with the Joneses” meets Arms Race in a very strange and also very satisfying story.
This is a truly marvelous book and would be the perfect gift for that precocious reader in your life.
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