When I first found out that one of the required textbooks for my English class was a children's book, I didn't know what to expect. I wondered how stories intended for little kids could possibly have enough rhetorical importance to be used in a college-level course. Slightly doubtful, I decided to give Tales from Outer Suburbia a shot, so I went to the student bookstore and bought it. In new condition. In hardback. For the sake of cost, if there isn't a used copy available, I usually won't buy it and just spend the semester mooching off of the library or a fellow classmate. However, given that this was in fact a picture book, I decided I could swing it.
Even though Shaun Tan's Tales From Outer Suburbia can be found in the juvenile fiction section of the library, it is a book that can be enjoyed by adults and children alike. First and foremost, the illustrations are almost surreal and fantastic as the stories themselves. Often, they add to the rhetoric, as seen in "Distant Rain", where the story itself is written on scraps of paper. Or "The Amnesia Machine" which is framed by fictional newspaper clippings, adding to the editorial and almost informative nature of the story.
The whimsical stories are narrated as though they are being retold by a child to a group of friends, and although they are seemingly simple and straightforward, they are a lot more profound and mature under the surface.I found that if I really dug deep enough, I could extract relevant and life lessons that led to moments of introspection beyond what I would expect from a child's book.
Illustration from "Distant Rain"
While this book was an eccentric choice as a school textbook, it has definitely been effective. It makes our class assignments more interesting, because the stories really do make you think, and they can be interpreted in so many different ways that when I hear what a classmate has to say about a particular story, it really gives me an entirely new perspective to consider.
