The Haunted Playground (Shade Books) [Paperback]

Shaun Tan (Author)

Book Description

Age Level: 10 and up | Grade Level: 5 and up | Series: Shade Books

Gavin is obsessed with hunting for treasure with his metal detector. He finds the perfect spot a huge, sandy playground. Then he meets a bunch of kids who have a mysterious treasure hunt of their own. Gavin gets the feeling they want him to stay . . . forever.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Australian artist Tan, whose weighty, fantastical picture books for older readers have been gradually filtering into the U.S. (his graphic novel The Arrival received a starred review in Booklist), tries his hand at illustrated fiction in this entry in the Shade Books series, which is aimed at kids with reading difficulties. A lonely boy, Gavin, who appears to be a young teen, has an unusual hobby. The owner of a metal detector, he visits playgrounds at night in search of valuables. One evening, a group of sylphlike children appear. They ask him to join in their game, and he agrees, though he begins to feel he is the game. Gavin's instinct is right, and he's soon being pursued across the park by demonic children who never want him to leave. If the ending is disappointingly abrupt, the suspense builds adequately, and the telling is simple enough to allow slower readers to enjoy the story without feeling they are reading something babyish. Tan's black-and-white sketches give the story much of its dark lure. --Booklist

Tan's moody, intense black-and-white art confers sophistication upon the books, suggesting edgy magazine stories rather than stodgy nutritional reading. --Bulletin of the Center for Children's Book

About the Author

Shaun Tan was born in 1974 and grew up in Australia. As a teenager, Shaun began drawing and painting images for science fiction and horror stories in small press magazines. Since then, he has received numerous awards for his picture books. He has recently worked for Blue Sky Studios and Pixar, providing concept artwork for forthcoming films. His book The Arrival was one of the best reviewed books of 2007.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 10 and up
  
• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Stone Arch Books (September 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1598899163
• ISBN-13: 978-1598899160
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.8 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #828,791 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #85 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Children's Books > Sports & Activities > Games > Fiction

More About the Author

Shaun Tan was born in 1974 and grew up in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. In school he became known as the 'good drawer' which partly compensated for always being the shortest kid in every class. He graduated from the University of WA in 1995 with joint honours in Fine Arts and English Literature, and currently works full time as a freelance artist and author in Melbourne.

Shaun began drawing and painting images for science fiction and horror stories in small-press magazines as a teenager, and has since become best known for illustrated books that deal with social, political and historical subjects through surreal, dream-like imagery. Books such as The Rabbits , The Red Tree, The Lost Thing and the acclaimed wordless novel The Arrival have been widely translated throughout Europe, Asia and South America, and enjoyed by readers of all ages. Shaun has also worked as a theatre designer, and worked as a concept artist for the films Horton Hears a Who and Pixar's WALL-E. He is currently directing a short film with Passion Pictures Australia; his most recently published book is Tales from Outer Suburbia.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Early work, but pretty good., August 6, 2010

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Haunted Playground (Shade Books) (Paperback)

Shaun Tan, The Haunted Playground (Stone Arch Books, 1998)

First off: Shaun Tan rocks. We all know that now, thanks to The Arrival, which came out a couple of years ago, won pretty much every award known to man short of the Nobel Prize, and I think (but don't quote me) it may have even hit the New York Times bestseller list briefly. It is, quite simply, a great book. Too early to say, but I'm thinking it's destined for classic status (and will start hitting school curricula as soon as people figure out how to teach wordless graphic novels). What most of us on this side of the pond didn't know was that Shaun Tan had been quietly turning out work in his native Australia for a long, long time before that, work that got very limited release in America. It took me a couple of months after reading The Arrival to come up with a bibliography, and it's taken me a lot longer than that to find an avenue by which I can actually get my hands on some of these older books (my library dropped out of Worldcat last year, much to my dismay), but I think I've found a good dealer, and I can start getting a Shaun Tan fix regularly. Thank heaven for that.

The Haunted Playground is a very small book, balanced equally between text and Tan's trademark illustrations. The story itself is quite spare (Tan's writing, both here and in Tales of Outer Suburbia, reminds me a good deal of Caitlin Kiernan's), with just enough detail to fix the events in your mind, but the real draw here, of course, is the pictures. Tan's artwork has always seemed to me to be heavily influenced by the folks who drew for Twilight Zone: The Magazine, which was as notable for its distinctive illustrations as it was for the groundbreaking stories they routinely published. There's a bit of surrealism in there, a bit of "I'm influenced by collage but doing it by hand", and a whole lot of chiaroscuro and bleakness and claustrophobia. (Were he five to ten years older, he would have been a perfect artist for Gaiman's Sandman.) It shouldn't be a surprise that it works so well with Tan's tale here, which is exactly what the title tells you it is.

This is early work, and it has a kind of unformed feel to it. I mentioned the Kiernan angle before, but Kiernan is much more capable of coming up with an ending like this that's satisfying; with The Haunted Playground, you'll probably be left wanting to know what happened after the story ends, just as I was, but not in that overly-ambiguous sense one gets from Kiernan's best stories. Still, the illustrations almost make up for it, and if you're an established Tan fan, you obviously need to check this out. If you're not, start with The Arrival and Tales from Outer Suburbia before digging into the earlier work. *** ½

4 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars pictures better than story, August 26, 2007

By 

Judith Ann Hogan - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Haunted Playground (Shade Books) (Paperback)

While Shaun Tan is graphically exquisite, he is not a writer. I think he should stick with his art work and let someone else do the writing. Made very little sense, left no message at all. Just my opinion, Judy Hogan