Beautiful. Sad.

Shaun Tan's The Red Tree is amazingly beautiful and painfully sad. It is sad in a deep, lonely, adolescent way that I can still relate to, because I remember being misunderstood and blue.

Tan is an award winning artist and author, which leaves me in complete awe that one person can write so poignantly and create such interesting, powerful pictures.

This book is probably not targeted to my eight month old little monster (it says Grade 3 and up, but they have no idea how advanced Lucas is). Wynn prefers not to read it to him because he thinks it's too sad. Lucas likes the pictures - they have an intense depth of color that is very attractive. And I like to read it with him, in the hope that when he reaches his own adolescence I will remember that sometimes "the world is a deaf machine," but if you give it a little time, there might just be "right in front of you/ bright and vivid" something good.