The Arrival by Shaun Tan * * * *
I “read” The Arrival by Shaun Tan for the 2026 POPSUGAR Reading Challenge. This was for prompt number 41, "a book in a different format than your usual: physical, audio, eBook". And I am putting “read” in quotation marks here because The Arrival is a wordless picture book. There is no actual text to read. Instead, you move through the story entirely through the illustrations, looking at what is happening and inferring the meaning from the images. I gave it four stars. The book has a very distinctive visual style. Tan created the final illustrations primarily with graphite pencil and then digitally coloured them, drawing on the look of early photography, old pictorial archives, and family photo albums. That explains the sepia tones and slightly faded, historical quality of the images. At the same time, the world itself is surreal. The people and their emotions are rendered quite realistically, but the cities, animals, plants, machines, and everyday objects are just unfamilia...