Age Appropriateness: Secondary and Middle School
Genre: Historical Fiction, Graphic Novel
Media: Sketches
Review: This is a wordless book that tells the tale of a man who emigrated to a new country, leaving his wife and child behind. Due to this, it is a unique example of representing historical fiction. He goes through the struggles of adapting to this new environment, making acquaintances with language barriers, and finding ways to survive. He also meets many other emigrants that share with him their personal story of how they came to the country. After the man has become settled in his environment, he sends a letter to his wife and child encouraging them to come live with him, and they do. The reader can come to know all of this without any words on the pages.
Style Analysis:
The author's choice to delete the use of words in the book emphasizes the focus on facial features. Throughout the story, the reader can see that the man is unable to speak the language of many of those whom he meets, but they communicate with each other using body language and facial features. As readers, we have to do the same, and that is what makes this book superb stylistically. Allusions develop in pictures, imagery is abundant, and each page is pouring with visual metaphors.

This is the story of an immigrant leaving his family behind, and coming to America hoping for a better life. The city is so foreign to him, as are the illustrations to the reader. The landscapes of the new country are daunting and sometimes downright scary. The hustle and bustle of the city is confusing. The language is gibberish, the animals could be monsters, the buildings are strange. The reader feels the father's sense of isolation and confusion. After getting checked in at (what is similar to) Ellis Island, the father stumbles around this new place until he finds a place to stay. He has a pet living there too! He has only a few coins and a strange map that makes no sense. He meets other immigrants too, some of whom have much sadder pasts than his own. He manages to meet a friend and feasts with them. Revitalized, he soon sets out to look for work. After a few short gigs putting up flyers and delivering strange boxes into strange box holes, he lands a job at an assembly line in a factory, where he befriends an old man with a story of his own - in fact - a devastating story of returning to his hometown after war, and there is nothing left there. Awful! The father sends away money to his family and eventually tells them to come to America. The seasons go by and he misses them dearly. We see pages of exotic leaves and trees change through the seasons, and after the long winter, his wife and daughter arrive! It is such a wonderful ending. On the very last page, his young daughter is helping a new young immigrant find her way around. Very touching.

Karp, J. (2007). The Arrival. Booklist, 104(1), 115. Retrieved October 3, 2009, from Article Citation database.

Sutton, R. (2007). The Arrival. The Horn Book, 83(6), 669, 671. Retrieved October 3, 2009, from Article Citation database.

I had never read a book like this before. The story was powerful and the images striking! It is a story of a man who leaves his family to start a new life in a new place as something ominous is creeping into their current homeland. He has to learn the language and figure out how things work in this new place where everything is different. He largely learns from other people and gathers their stories of coming to the new land from hardships in their homes as well (a girl being forced to work in terrible conditions, a place where war has come, a soldier who finds nothing left of his family...) Finally, he is able to afford his family to join him.
The art work is expressive and clearly tells the story.
Loved the comparison of the items in the family's home at the beginning of the story and the end. Also, the notion that the cycle continues as the daughter girls a new immigrant directions in the closing pages of the book. ( )

This is a gorgeous, wordless graphic novel that uses a combination of familiarity and surreality to tell what is at its heart simply the story of an immigrant in a new land.

Not only would I happily have almost any page from this book framed on my wall, but Tan manages to tell a complete story with absolutely no words, no small feat. The individual stories and the emotions of the characters come through loud and clear, and the end result is a book that had me finishing it and flipping back to the front to read it all over again. ( )