Red Tree - Softcover

Tan, Shaun

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0734411375 ISBN 13: 9780734411372

Publisher: Lothian, 2010

Synopsis

A reassuring and hopeful picture book to remind children that bad thoughts and feelings won't last forever. The Red Tree, is a book about feelings - feelings that can not always be simply expressed in words.

The perfect book to soothe worries during stressful times.

A small child awakes to find blackened leaves falling from her bedroom ceiling, threatening to overwhelm her. 'Sometimes you wake up with nothing to look forward to...' As she wanders around a world that is complex, puzzling and alienating, she is overtaken by a myriad of feelings.

Just as it seems all hope is lost, the girl returns to her bedroom to find that a tiny red seedling has grown to fill the room with warm light.

As a kind of fable, The Red Tree seeks to remind us that, though some bad feelings are inevitable, they are always tempered by hope. From internationally and critically acclaimed Kate Greenaway Medal, Astrid Lindgren prize and Academy Award winner, Shaun Tan.

About this title

About the Author

Award-winning artist and author Shaun Tan has achieved international recognition for his work, including the CBCA Picture Book of the Year Award for The Rabbits (with J. Marsden), an Honor Book Award for Memorial (with G. Crew) and The Lost Thing, an APA Design Award, an Honorable Mention at the Bologna Book Fair, three Aurealis Awards, and Spectrum Gold and Silver Awards. In 2001 he was named best artist at the World Fantasy Awards in Montreal. A graduate of the University of Washington in 1995, with honors in fine arts and English literature, he lives in Perth, Australia. The Red Tree is his fifth book (and the first published in North America).

From School Library Journal

Grade 3 Up-An astonishing fable in picture-book format. A girl moving through landscapes of hopelessness and isolation encounters an image of hope on the book's final page. Through the weight of her sorrow, readers conclude, on both intellectual and emotional levels, that living in despair is waiting for hope. Tan's sophisticated mixed-media illustrations include fantasy and dream elements, and subtle symbolism packed together with an array of art techniques ranging from complicated cut-paper collages to Drescher-like paintings, but serious. These complex pictures send visual impressions powerful enough to cause readers to gasp as a new page is revealed. The simple, direct text ("darkness overcomes you" or "sometimes you just don't know what you are supposed to do"), often poetic ("the world is a deaf machine"), serves both as an entryway into the complicated illustrations, and as an enhancement to them. Perhaps too sophisticated in its point of view for some youngsters, this is nonetheless a book of amazing beauty, high quality, and distinguished artistry.
Liza Graybill, Worcester Public Library, MA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Lothian
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0734411375
• ISBN 13: 9780734411372
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 32