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.