Hometown by Shaun Tan is a wildly imaginative graphic novel about home, identity, and deciding where we belong. With five starred reviews, this surreal and thought-provoking story is one of the most visually striking middle grade releases of the year.
I would add this to my Caldecott longlist for 2027, but alas, Shaun Tan is Australian and ineligible. The Caldecott Award honors only citizens and residents of the U.S. This is a great choice for state reading lists, such as Bluebonnet and Lone Star here in Texas.
Hometown has been added to my September 2026 Spotlight Amazon List.
Author and Illustrator: Shaun Tan
Genre: graphic fiction, science fiction
Setting: a distant alien planet
Themes: family, home, extraterrestrials, aliens, outer space, life on other planets, displacement, adoption, found family, astronauts, belonging, difficult choices
Protagonist: female teen, olive-skinned, sole human among extraterrestrial beings
Recommended for: Grades 3-9
Starred reviews: Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Hornbook, SLJ, and Booklist
Publication date: September 15, 2026
WHAT IT’S ABOUT
An unnamed girl lives an ordinary life in an extraordinary place. She has a loving family, good friends, a beautiful hometown, and approximately three hundred pets. Her family and neighbors may have horns, tentacles, scales, claws, or other unusual features, but to her, they are simply the people she loves.
Then a spaceship crashes near her town, bringing a visitor who looks remarkably like her. The stranger tells the girl that they are both human—and insists that this alien planet is not her “real” home. He wants her to leave everything she knows and travel with him to a distant world filled with millions of people who look like them.
His arrival forces the girl to question things she had never questioned before. Does sharing someone’s appearance mean she belongs with them? Is home determined by where we came from, or by the relationships and experiences that have shaped us? Most importantly, who has the right to answer those questions for her?
A VISUAL WORLD TO EXPLORE
Tan creates the girl’s hometown with watercolor, colored pencil, and ink, filling the pages with strange creatures, living architecture, crowded landscapes, and delightful visual surprises. His muted, earthy palette gives this dreamlike planet a sense of history and solidity. Even its most intimidating residents appear capable of warmth and affection.
The detailed illustrations reward slow, careful reading. Full-page scenes, traditional panels, and wordless sequences work together to reveal far more than the spare text could communicate alone. There is also plenty of humor, particularly in the narrator’s matter-of-fact descriptions of sights that readers will find wonderfully bizarre.
WHO DECIDES WHERE WE BELONG?
Beneath its fantastical surface, Hometown is a deeply human story about adoption, displacement, cultural identity, family, and belonging. The astronaut assumes that physical similarity gives him the authority to define the girl’s identity—but Tan leaves room for her to consider the question and tell her own story.
Surreal, emotionally resonant, and packed with discussion possibilities, Hometown is an excellent choice for elementary and middle school readers. The 2026 film Project Hail Mary is PG-13, so if you’ve had students who have seen it, this book has similar themes of a lone human finding family among extra-terrestrial life forms. It’s also a natural companion to Tan’s acclaimed The Arrival (2006).
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