It's not a young children's picture book maybe tweens can begin to appreciate it, but I prefer to think of it as an all-ages book. A happy and somewhat surprising transformation happens at the end-Cicada has the last laugh, shall we say-but in most of the book he is pretty miserable, and at one point he is even depicted as suicidal after he is no longer needed at the company. The job is data entry, he is underpaid, disrespected at every turn, and he works in these corporate offices for many years, bullied. So Cicada the book is about racism and classism, as Cicada the character is mistreated at work by other people because they think he doesn't belong there even though he quietly and efficiently does his job without complaint. Cicada is less ambitious, more minimal on almost every level, though it does feature about 150 words, written in a kind of representation of how an outsider or newcomer might speak if they are learning English. Original review, somewhat revised, 2/5/19: Shaun Tan is the author of the wordless masterpiece, The Arrival. Initially I had thought that Tan may have wanted to see the guy in the story as Asian, but I agree that it is unnecessary to assume that, so I changed my review. 4/2/23: I rarely revise my reviews based on criticism I got, but my respondent below was right, and I reread the story a bit more slowly and sensitively.
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