The winners of the 2008 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards were announced today (see the list of past winners and honor books here). The judges awarded a special citation, only the fifth in the BGHB's 40-year history, to The Arrival by Shaun Tan (Arthur A. Levine, 2007). On his website, Tan describes the book as "a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a forgotten time." The more I read about the ideas behind the book and the process of creating it (also on Tan's website), the more interested I am in reading it and the rest of Tan's work, none of which is available at my library. I hope that will change now.
Another book about the immigrant experience won the BGHB Award for a Picture Book in 1994. Grandfather's Journey by Allen Say (Houghton Mifflin, 1993) is a beautiful book, quiet and powerful; one of my favorites. It won the Caldecott earlier that year, too. Highly recommended.
