Children with language impairment will tend to flick through the pages rapidly, reading the text as quickly as possible to make it to the finish line, as they do with most books. Shaun Tan has created a masterpiece.' I use the book as a shared reading text for older students 9 - 14 years of age. Children's author John Marsden has described it thus, 'It is the best picture book I have seen. To describe it as simply a children's book perhaps does it an injustice. The Red Tree is a work of vast beauty and quiet power. The message of hope is given voice and its music is fully sounded in the final panel of the red tree, floweringin all its glory. The red leaf's appearance makes a lie of the false notion that terrible fates are inevitable. But, the little red leaf - that can be found only with difficulty - tells us a different tale.It tells us that there is always hope. The text reads, ' terrible fates are inevitable.' The message of the six sided dice andthe path leading inexorably to the monstrous bird is that perhaps chance and luck play no part in life, that there is only despairand impending disaster that awaits us. The girl holds in her hands a large dice that has whatappears to be six on each side. Perhaps my favourite picture, is of the girl standing on a path that leads to a massive bird likemechanical monstrosity, that looms on the horizon. Hope is characterized throughout by the shining beacon of a red leaf, that often flutters in the margins of Tan's austere landscapes. Despite the bleak illustrations, at the heart of the story is the message that hope springs eternal. In essence, each pictureconveys a visual representation of an overwhelmingly, at times, depressed mood. The text often serves as a caption for the colour saturated pictures. The accompanyingtext is deliberately spare. The slender story line depicts a young girl moving through a sequence of striking landscapes. What separates this book from others of the same genre is Shaun Tan's wholly idiosyncratic artwork. The basic story of a little girl having a particularly horrid day is not uncommon in children's literature. To the ear it reads as a sparsely written children's book, but to the eye the book's lavish depictions of isolationand despair require a much deeper analysis.

Shaun Tan's The Red Tree almost defies any rational classification. An Analysis of Shaun Tan's Luminous Work of Art

Book the red tree