Shaun Tan, “Never Eat the Last Olive at a Party” from His Graphic Novel “Rules of Summer”
Shaun Tan is an Australian artist, writer and film maker. He won an Academy Award for “The Lost Thing”, a 2011 animated film adaptation of a 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated. Other books he has written and illustrated include Red Tree” and “The Arrival”.
Tan was born in Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1974 and grew up in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. In 2006, his wordless graphic novel The Arrival won the Book of the Year prize as part of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. The same book won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year award in 2007, and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards Premier’s Prize in 2006
“In a book that reads like an homage to The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, Lindgren award-winner Shaun Tan offers a sequence of paintings that represent a boy’s cumulative summer knowledge, framed as rules and populated by Tan’s now-familiar menagerie of one-eyed robots, malevolent rabbits, and windup dinosaurs. The rules appear on the left, while lavish, brilliant paintings of the accompanying disasters light up the opposite pages.
An older boy yanks his younger brother away from a platter at a soiree full of glaring raptors (“Never eat the last olive at a party”); frowns when bats, lizards, and sea anemones move into the living room (“Never leave the back door open overnight”); and, after a fistfight, bundles the younger boy into a locomotive and sends him off through Siberian wastes (“Never lose a fight”).” – Publishers Weekly