Tan's affecting and sophisticated picture books, including The Red Tree
, pack an emotional and visual wallop, but saturate readers with ennui. This melancholy story, despite pale whimsy, cannot muster much hope for those "lost things" with uncertain raisons d'être
. The narrator is a stoop-shouldered, Dilbert-like nerd who finds the Lost Thing while collecting those quintessential cast-offs—bottle caps—on an industrial beach. Tan pictures the Lost Thing as a garbage-truck-size red vessel with crablike gray claws and tentacles, equal parts organism, machine and teakettle. Surely it is too weird to pass unnoticed, yet everyone ignores it. The storyteller and thing interact like a boy and dog, playing fetch, making a sandcastle (or sand-factory, really). After feeding the thing in his gloomy backyard shed, the hero tries to deliver it to the windowless Federal Department of Odds & Ends. Yet he cannot bear to leave it there: "This is a place for forgetting," a machine/man hybrid janitor portends. Only through effort does he find an alternative suggested by the janitor, "a dark little gap off some anonymous little street," which opens into a Dalí-esque habitation of other frolicking, forgotten things. Tan's intricate multimedia paintings reference Hopper's empty windows and the alienated cityscapes of Lang's Metropolis
. This weighty book is best suited to mature children or older comics/science-fiction readers, who will goggle at the marvelous illustrations. Ages 7-up. (Feb.)
