HOMETOWN

An extraterrestrial visitor draws a girl’s ordinary existence into question in this latest from the celebrated Australian graphic novelist.

“Life is good here. I go to work, do chores, visit friends, hang out. The usual stuff.” With that familiar mantra of disaffected youth, a seemingly teenage, olive-skinned girl feels restless. “[Sometimes] I wonder if things could be a bit more interesting. You know, just different.” The mundanity of her musings reads differently in the context of her environs: Enveloped by a loving adoptive family, she is the sole humanoid amid a bizarre and captivating world of creatures sporting horns, claws, and tentacles. Change arrives in the form of a light-skinned intruder clad in an astronaut suit who disparages her community and insists she return with him to where “millions of other creatures…looked just like me.” Intricately detailed watercolor, colored pencil, and ink pen art absorbs readers in crowded compositions featuring fantastical and peculiar, sometimes grotesque illustrations in a muted palette, like a sepia-toned sci-fi Hieronymus Bosch piece. Full-page scenes mix seamlessly with multicelled and wordless panels, while minimalist text, poised and clever, rests beneath or opposite the panels. Revisiting the themes of home and displacement that will be familiar to fans of Tan’s The Arrival (2007), this is a profoundly metaphysical and splendidly transportive tale.

A spectacularly surreal coming-of-age story about choice, family, and the gravitational pull of belonging.