I am a huge fan of Gene Luen Yang, one of the best graphic novelists working today, especially Boxers & Saints, American Born Chinese, and The EternalI am a huge fan of Gene Luen Yang, one of the best graphic novelists working today, especially Boxers & Saints, American Born Chinese, and The Eternal Smile: Three Stories. I started out this book and after a few pages was disappointed wit, after he concept the sweeping sagas and magical forays of his previous books this one looked set to be a clichéd high school basketball novel. By the end I was crying.
It definitely is a high school basketball book. But it is a nonfiction account of a team he followed in real time, and Yang was committed to writing regardless of what happened in the season. So that made it suspenseful, the frames of the games, the timer going down, really conveyed the thrill of the game. But it was much more--it was an autofiction about how Yang decided to write the book, some of his struggles with what to include and how to write it, and how his career developed and changed over the course of writing it. And it was about the difficulty of penetrating the lives of the players on the court. And it was about the history of basketball, including several streams that come together--Catholic schools adoption of the sport, women's basketball, and basketball in China. Most profoundly, it is about racism, diversity, and what it means to be an American. Oh, and even the endnotes are good....more
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