Scott Westerfeld and Shaun Tan have scored big, positive reviews in the NYT Book Review.

Gene Luen Yang writes of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival:

Reading “The Arrival” feels like paging through a family treasure newly discovered up in the attic… Such visual eloquence can only motivate readers to seek out any future graphic novels from Shaun Tan, regardless of where they might be shelved.

My only quibble with Yang’s review is that he spends far too many* paragraphs arguing that “[t]hough Tan is a native-born Australian, an American ambience pervades his book.” Not exactly. Tan researched the immigrant experience from all over the world. Naturally, that means some American imagery. There are scenes set in what looks like Ellis Island, the famous entry point for European migrants arriving in New York city, because Tan absorbed hundreds of photographs of the Ellis Island Immigrant Station and reworked them in his imagination. But he did the same thing for Australia, too, in the landscapes and the vaguely marsupial creatures that populate his fantastic new continent. Then there’s the very Chinese architecture of the Old Country and the social decay symbolised by dragon-like tentacles. Tan’s book is a testament to the universal immigrant experience; it also seems to be an unintended litmus test for insularity.

James Hynes writes of Scott Westerfeld’s Extras:

“Extras” is just as thrilling as its predecessors, but it’s also a thoughtful novel of ideas, a brilliant parody of the modern obsession with fame. Like almost everyone else in her world, Aya records everything she does with the help of a semi-sentient hovercam (a sort of floating soccer ball that’s a cross between R2D2 and Weegee), using the resulting footage to boost her face rank. It’s as if the whole world were like Facebook, with every citizen simultaneously a celebrity and his or her own paparazzi.

Both books are fantastic (in either sense of the word). It’s good to see them getting attention in the most conspicuous review space on the planet.

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