The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan

The Lost Thing is a fiction picturebook about a boy who discovers a strange big red creature on a beach which seems lost and out of place. The story is based on the social subject of 'belonging' in which the boy tries to find out where it belongs despite the disinterest of everyone else. As with most of Shaun Tan's books this one contains some quirky illustrations, but they are still relevant to the reader and could represent any city or suburban area. 

The story is told as a first person recount by the main character, it is a bit different than the typical recount as at the start of the story the main character addresses the reader "So you want to hear a story?" he asks, "I'll just tell you about the time I found that lost thing". Addressing the reader adds a sense of intimacy between the main character's story and the reader which allows for engagement from the first sentence. It also seems to make the story more relatable to you as the reader instead possibly invoking more connection with the story.

For me this book seems to be a comment on society in which we are all to busy with our face booking, tweeting, working, studying, and other amass of virtual and material distractions that we tend to walk past, ignore or avoid the "lost things". The concept of 'lost things' could represent a wide variety of arguably more important things that tend to get lost such as certain relationship interactions (quality time, face to face interactions, complements etc.), certain people (family members, friends, poor, homeless etc.) or even certain political, societal and historical issues (human rights, animal rights, global warming, slave labor, gay marriage, colonisation of Australia etc.).

This book has so many images to look at and each page has a background collage of engineering images which came out of Shaun Tan's dad's old engineering text books. The engineering images make no sense as they are out of order and this engenders a sense of belonging in the reader as they are likely to not understand the images they may feel like an outsider. However if you are one of the few who have to have gone to university and studied mechanical engineering and are capable of deciphering the random diagrams and abstract formula then you would possibly not feel like an outsider.

This book can be read and interpreted on so many levels and the more you think about the story the more involving it becomes. The last page is certainly one of the most important comments on society and I encourage anyone who reads it to have a think about why.