Tired of living in suburbia or wherever you are? Why not try an alternate reality with the bizarre stories, poems, and musings, accompanied by even more surreal drawings, doodlings, and full-color paintings from the strange brain of Shaun Tan. (Tan is the innovative Australian artist who brought us to another world in his award-winning wordless graphic novel, The Arrival.) Check out the unconventional table of contents, with each chapter represented by a postage stamp. Starting with "The Water Buffalo," an enigmatic description by an unnamed female narrator recalling the big buffalo that lived in the vacant lot at the end of the street and pointed with his hoof whenever anyone stopped for advice, the stories get odder and odder, but in a good contemplative way. What to make of Eric, the foreign exchange student who comes to live with the narrator and his family and sleeps in the pantry? If you just read the text aloud, it's a bit offbeat, but then show the illustrations of Carl, a tiny black leaf-like creature. Strange. The 15 stories appear to take place on Earth, but they're set in some weird neighborhood not even on the map, where a stranger clad in wet, barnacle-crusted diving gear plods down the street; a dugong appears on a family's front lawn; there's a tree-filled inner courtyard, accessible through a hole in a house's attic floor, where it's winter in summer and vice versa; and silent stick figures wander the sidewalks. What does it all mean?

Illustrations accompanying each chapter are mostly best examined close up. Teachers and librarians, when you read this aloud, you'll want to put the illustrations up on your Smartboard or make a PowerPoint so your group can peruse and puzzle over all the odd details. Each chapter will make you think of a corresponding writing prompt, like "Make Your Own Pet" and "Distant Rain," a poem about unread poems, all of which may ultimately turn kids into Dada-ists or worse.

THEMES: ADVENTURE AND ADVENTURERS. AUSTRALIA. FANTASY. SHORT STORIES. SUBURBAN LIFE.