the magic fish

I know I’m not the only book lover in the world who justifies their reading purchases to themselves in creative ways [insert laughing crying emoji]. Mostly I do so by telling myself that when I’m done with it, I’ll put it in my classroom library! The only trouble is, sometimes it takes many months (or years!) for me to work my way through those books I promised were “for the kids.” That was the case with Trung Le Nguyen’s debut graphic novel The Magic Fish. I preordered it back in October 2020, and I’ve been hanging onto it at home ever since, thinking it would be my next read. It finally made it to the top of the pile over the weekend, after the last day of school for the year. I am happy to say it’s stunning and emotionally authentic, and sad that I waited so long to pick it up. And it will DEFINITELY go on the shelves in my classroom in the fall. 

 

Tiến loves his family and his friends…but Tiến has a secret he’s been keeping from them, and it might change everything. An amazing YA graphic novel that deals with the complexity of family and how stories can bring us together. 

Real life isn’t a fairytale. 

But Tiến still enjoys reading his favorite stories with his parents from the books he borrows from the local library. It’s hard enough trying to communicate with your parents as a kid, but for Tiến, he doesn’t even have the right words because his parents are struggling with their English. Is there a Vietnamese word for what he’s going through? 

Is there a way to tell them he’s gay? 

A beautifully illustrated story by Trung Le Nguyen that follows a young boy as he tries to navigate life through fairytales, an instant classic that shows us how we are all connected. The Magic Fish tackles tough subjects in a way that accessible with readers of all ages, and teaches us that no matter what—we can all have our own happy endings.

The Magic Fish is a masterpiece of art and narrative. It interweaves the stories of Tiến, a Vietnamese-American boy growing up in the Midwest who doesn’t have the language or knowledge to tell his family he is gay, his mother Helen, who immigrated from Vietnam many years ago and made a life for her family in America, and various retellings of fairy tales, inflected by multiple cultures, and underpinned by gorgeous artwork of couture-inspired princess dresses. Visually, it is gorgeous, and it is also incredibly lovely in the fine crafting and interconnection of the major narratives. It is, I think, one of the most beautiful books I’ve read in the past 10 years.

 

Tiến’s story is perhaps the baseline for the book, though he shares many pages (and time) with his mother Helen. They read books together in the evenings to practice their language skills. Those books are full of fairy tales, and as several of the characters remind each other, fairy tales change in the retelling – there is no one right way to tell a fairy tale. This truth mirrors the story of Helen’s immigration to America – that there is no one “true” immigration story, and that each one changes in its retelling and memory.

 

The two main fairy tales in The Magic Fish are Cinderella (and its close cousin Tattercoats) and The Little Mermaid. The retellings are interspersed alongside Tiến’s tension and confusion about how to express his truth to his parents, his mother’s memory of home and her longing to return to her mother, and her wish to reconnect with a past that she feels is slipping away. Author Trung Le Nguyen treats all of these strands of story with deftness and authority, and the whole is bittersweet, layered with meaning, and true in the way that sometimes only fiction can be.

 

One of the things that I noticed immediately in the reading was the way that color signifies a change in scenery and time-space. Blue is the palette of fairy tales, yellow the palette of the past (especially Helen’s world pre-Tiến), and red is the present for Tiến and his family. Beyond this signaling of worlds, the focus of the art is the intricately detailed linework. Seriously, it is mesmerizing and intense. The detail in the illustrations of hair alone is incredible, and then add in the dresses, crafted with couture classics in mind and with seriously magical details, flounces, and draping – it’s really unbelievable.

 

Of the many marvelous things about this book, the art is of course the most obvious, given the medium. But I am now intensely interested in the depth of the narrative – the symbolism of the sea, peaches, princesses, and celestial imagery, the choices in the treatment of language (Vietnamese indicated by “<>” within speech bubbles), and the afterword, which features musings on comics as an art form, and fairy tales as immigration stories. I want to teach this book – it is multimodal and rife with connections and allusions. I’m sure I’ll be rereading it again this summer and considering how I could incorporate it in my high school classes.

 

The Magic Fish is a profound, magical working of art and story. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

 

Recommended for: art lovers, comic readers, those interested in the best of young adult literature, and fans of fairy tales and beautiful dresses.

icebreaker

I find myself picking up more and more fantasy and science fiction these days, sometimes out of pure inclination, but also as a way to step away from the reading I do as an English teacher. However, every now and then something else will grab my attention, as A.L. Graziadei’s Icebreaker did. As a hockey fan, I couldn’t pass up their debut YA contemporary about rivals going to college together and (inevitably) falling in love in the face of high-stakes hockey pressure. 

 

Seventeen-year-old Mickey James III is a college freshman, a brother to five sisters, and a hockey legacy. With a father and a grandfather who have gone down in NHL history, Mickey is almost guaranteed the league's top draft spot.

The only person standing in his way is Jaysen Caulfield, a contender for the #1 spot and Mickey's infuriating (and infuriatingly attractive) teammate. When rivalry turns to something more, Mickey will have to decide what he really wants, and what he's willing to risk for it.

This is a story about falling in love, finding your team (on and off the ice), and choosing your own path.

 

Mickey James III is as self-aware as a white seventeen-year-old hockey prodigy-slash-legacy and college freshman could be. He’s also not doing so well. First of all, he’s fixated on going #1 in the NHL draft, second, he’s actively trying not to make close friends (he’s only going to be in college one year, after all), and third, he’s deeply depressed and hiding it from everyone who cares about him. When teammate (and fellow prodigy) Jaysen Caulfield shows up and seems to thrive off of shaking up Mickey’s world, he does the unthinkable: he starts falling for him. Icebreaker is a story about learning to listen to your feelings, learning to trust, and dealing (or not dealing) with mental illness – all under the pressure of the bright lights of an NHL future.

 

What I liked: okay, wow, I liked a lot about this book, so hold on tight. First off, the detail and description of/about hockey behind the scenes, and the reality of being a college athlete, were well done. I can’t claim to be a college athlete fiction completist, but I was a two-sport college athlete myself, and that portion of the book felt very true-to-life. Pre-season training, forced team bonding, figuring out a college campus while feeling woefully inadequate? Yep yep yep. Icebreaker’s authenticity of the behind-the-scenes chaos of college sporting life also reminded me strongly of an all-time favorite series, Ngozi Ukazu’s Check, Please! As did the forbidden pining for a teammate, lol.

 

Other things I loved: Mickey is the youngest of five sisters, all of whom are stars in their own right. I loved their back-and-forth banter, and the way they looked out for their little bro. I cannot express how much it reminded my own college experience, when my younger sister and I helped my brother adjust to campus life (yes, siblings do sometimes all go to the same school, lol). Mickey’s unabashed support and belief in his sisters was super sweet too, rounding out his character nicely. Combined with Mickey’s chip on the shoulder attitude and understandable abandonment issues, he definitely came across as a well-formed character, and a moody boy too. I also loved Mickey’s text message banter with Jaysen, his coming out scene(s), and the way that his hockey-famous family don’t make his sexual orientation a problem.

 

Weaknesses: Backstory and detail around Mickey’s childhood wasn’t introduced until quite late in the narrative. This left his self-identity out of focus, sort of hanging out in the background as he adapted to college, and experienced new-to-college adventures, until BAM! trauma ahead!! That was a little jarring. I think it makes sense – it’s authentic to the way humans think (avoid, avoid! avoid!!! until unavoidable), and the story is told in the first person after all. It was just a bit confusing on the reader side of things, as it was hard to understand Mickey’s unwavering focus on the draft as the be-all and end-all, and his fixation on a rivalry with Caulfield, without it. The college jock banter also felt half-formed. Some of it felt real, yes. But I think that the book would have benefited from about 20% more dialogue overall, to really get a sense of characters other than Mickey.

 

What I wanted more of: the James siblings! In Mickey’s eyes his sisters are certainly larger-than-life, and I feel like I could read a story centered around each one of them. I also wanted to know more about Nova Vintner, Mickey’s ex and best friend. The reader basically only gets to know her through texts, and I wanted more about her and how she and Mickey arrived at rock-solid friendship at age seventeen. There were also a couple of points where Graziadei mentions that the characters chatted about insignificant things, or important stuff… but then didn’t give details! As a reader, I would prefer to read those conversations than try to imagine them! (I didn’t know enough about the other characters to guess what they might talk about, and our protagonist Mickey is described as grumpy and socially stunted).

 

Overall, Icebreaker was a very enjoyable read as a fan of hockey, LGBTQ+ YA, and as a former college athlete. Though it wasn’t perfect, I was definitely rooting for Mickey (and Jaysen!), and I devoured their story in one day.

 

Recommended for: fans of hockey and Check, Please!, and those looking to round out their bookshelves with college-set YA, LGBTQ+ representation, and/or contemporaries that deal with mental health challenges.

manu

There are days when you need an impeccably illustrated magic school story to escape reality.* During the first week of January, when we in the DC area had a surfeit of snow days, I picked up and very much enjoyed Manu, Kelly Fernández's middle grade fantasy graphic novel. Manu is a magic school story with a twist. The twist? It’s set at an all-girls religious school with a mix of nuns, saints, and brujería, drawing on the author’s Dominican heritage, culture, and folklore. Oh, and it features a delightful, trouble-magnet heroine.

Manu is always getting into trouble. The headmistress at school believes Manu has the potential to help people with her magic, but Manu would rather have fun than fit in. The other students claim she's secretly a demon and that she was raised by wolves. Manu doesn't care what people say about her… until an argument with her best friend Josefina ends with Manu getting cursed so she can't control her magic.

Manu is determined to break the curse and prove she's the best witchling at school. But great power comes at a cost, and it may be a price Manu isn't able to pay!

Manu – short for Manuela – always seems to attract trouble. Her magic is too strong, she’s using it for the wrong reasons (according to Mother Dolores, the headmistress), and she doesn’t really care about being kind and obedient, like her friend Josefina and the rest of the girls. Her idea of a good time is contravening the school’s rules, exploring the area around school, and practicing magic. When something “goes wrong” with her magic, Manu finds herself more of an outcast than usual, and, as one does, creates a small cataclysm. In Manu, author-illustrator Fernández integrates themes of identity, true friendship, and expectations vs. reality in a heartwarming and hilarious whole.

 

Manu is, more than anything else, a lot of FUN. It has magic and magic-gone-wrong, supernatural beasts with their own agendas, true friendship, and a mysterious origin story that takes the whole of the book to unravel. Readers in the target age group will love the trouble Manu gets into (and only sometimes gets out of!) and recognize the chaos and in-groups/outcast feeling of the school. It also will appeal for its setting and world-building. Fernández’s combination of brujería (witchcraft) with religious education is authentic to Dominican culture and will be familiar to those from many other Caribbean and Latin American backgrounds as well. Meanwhile, that mixture will likely seem unique and interesting to those with no previous exposure to it and draw them further into the story to find out what happens in the end.

 

Let’s go back to that true friendship bit I mentioned earlier. While Manu grew up at the school, her friend Josefina only started attending once she manifested her powers. Despite vastly different backgrounds, these two have a fast friendship: it has survived ups, downs, and Manu-created disasters. I think you could read their friendship as queer, but there is nothing overt – only a kiss on the cheek on the final pages. I’ll be interested to see if Fernández continues Manu’s adventures in a series and develops this hint any further.

 

Now onto the art! Fernández uses rounded black lines to delineate her characters and create the background and setting, combined with pastel brights (note: not a real art term) that are evocative of how bright sunlight can wash out vivid colors. Something like 98% of the book is illustrated in small sequential panels (3-6 per page), with the very occasional full-page image. The effect? A fun story told at almost breakneck pace: Manu keeps having (mis)adventures, and the next crisis is just around the corner/page.

 

In all, Manu is a delightful middle grade fantasy about figuring out who you are and how you fit in the world, complete with magic-gone-wild and exploding mangoes (read the book to find out more!).

 

Recommended for: fans of fantastical graphic novels for the middle grade set – anyone who liked Molly Knox Ostertag’s The Witch Boy series is sure to love Manu, and those interested in diversifying their graphic novel collection with characters of color and Caribbean settings.

 

*Reality = Teaching at a real high school during the pandemic, no magic included.

 

Fine print: I received an ARC of this title for review consideration from the publisher. I did not receive any compensation for this post.

wake: the hidden history of women-led slave revolts

While I was in Las Vegas this last week with my sister, we chatted about our most recent reads, and which ones stood out weeks and months after the reading. For me, one of those reads was Dr. Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez's graphic novel memoir-slash-academic history Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts. I picked this title up at my local library after seeing it mentioned in a newsletter from the publisher, and found it haunting and important.

Women warriors planned and led revolts on slave ships during the Middle Passage. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history.

Wake tells the “riveting” (Angela Y. Davis) story of Dr. Rebecca Hall, a historian, granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery. The accepted history of slave revolts has always told her that enslaved women took a back seat. But Rebecca decides to look deeper, and her journey takes her through old court records, slave ship captain’s logs, crumbling correspondence, and even the forensic evidence from the bones of enslaved women from the “negro burying ground” uncovered in Manhattan. She finds women warriors everywhere.

Using a “remarkable blend of passion and fact, action and reflection” (NPR), Rebecca constructs the likely pasts of Adono and Alele, women rebels who fought for freedom during the Middle Passage, as well as the stories of women who led slave revolts in Colonial New York. We also follow Rebecca’s own story as the legacy of slavery shapes her life, both during her time as a successful attorney and later as a historian seeking the past that haunts her.

Illustrated beautifully in black and white, Wake will take its place alongside classics of the graphic novel genre, like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. This story of a personal and national legacy is a powerful reminder that while the past is gone, we still live in its wake.

In Wake, Dr. Hall weaves together the process of historical discovery – detailing time spent in archives, attempting to cross-reference what fragments of source documents still exist, and the frustrations of accessing both – with the riveting histories of women-led slave revolts both on the Atlantic and in America. She combines a clear (and fascinating!) approach to the historical record with interpretation of what may have happened in the gaps – the untold stories – and her own experiences in academia as a Black woman investigating the horrific acts and legacies of slavery. Then she mixes in what she knows about her own ancestry. The resulting narrative is a fascinating intertwining of research and personal memoir that speaks directly to today’s issues of police brutality, protest, and white supremacy. 

“While the past is gone, we still live in its wake.”

What stood out most? I loved the insider's view of how anyone can go about “finding” women’s history. We are often told (or simply assume) that women were not instrumental in history because they are not mentioned in the historical record. But Hall breaks down that fallacy beautifully, showing that if you know how to search, if you look in the absences and margins, and dig, you can indeed find histories of women who changed the world, even in the driest and most difficult of documents. Her topic, of course, is women who led slave revolts. She refused to accept that it was always men who led slave revolts, and she was able to find evidence to support her hunch. 

One of the moments when I felt the most indignant about the content of this book (which after all would not exist without the inhumanity and banal evil of slavery) was when Dr. Hall was turned away from the archive at Lloyd’s of London. This former insurer of slave ship cargo (and now, just plain bank & insurer) cared (cares?) more about protecting its reputation than about the truth of the historical record. On their website they now claim to have taken responsibility and apologize for their part in the transatlantic slave trade in the wake of the George Floyd protests, but Hall points out that they care about profit and reputation than possibly connecting people who were forcibly stripped of their histories, culture, and lives with (any) closure. Hall is right to call them out, and I could feel the intensity of the moment when she recounted being escorted out of the Lloyd’s building by security deep in my chest. What cowards! 

Beyond the electrifying content, much of the success of a graphic novel depends on the interconnection of text and art. Hall and Martínez are a talented team – this story jumps off the page and into the light. The no-nonsense, realistic art style, in black pen on white background, puts the emphasis of the book on the very important content. That isn’t to say the art is neglected, no! There are feelings that are too much for words, and Martínez skillfully illustrates emotional, fraught, and frustrating moments so that the reader feels as if they are in them with the women of the story. The dust jacket is also gorgeous – with embossed layers, interesting fonts and illustration, and vivid color. 

In all, Wake is a powerful, instructive, and merciless look at the way history is made, recorded, found, and interpreted, and it is at the same time a very personal, familial story and a call to action. I felt deeply moved by this work, and I hope many will read and learn from it. 

Recommended for: fans of historical nonfiction and graphic novel memoirs, anyone interested in books that tie-in history and current issues for young readers (Jason Reynolds & Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped, for instance), and those looking for beautifully-constructed narratives that challenge them as readers, and challenge accepted history!