Graphic Novels

Class Act, Heart Stopper Dragon Hoops, just like I asked for!

Craft, J. Class Act, (2020) New York, NY: Quill Tree Books, HarperCollins Publishers. 

Oseman, A. Heart Stopper, (2020), New York, NY: Graphics, Scholastic. 

Yang, G. Dragon Hoops, (2020), New York, NY: First Second, Roaring Brook Press. 

These are all very school-centric graphic novels and as a 18 year public school educator I can say with full confidence that they all get it 100% right. 

I have not read New Kid, Jerry Craft’s precursor to Class Act and I figured that if I was confused I would go back and read it, but Class Act pulled me in right away and kept me engaged enough to read it in one sitting. Craft deftly touches on different perceptions of race and class, the damage caused by microaggressions and the impact of socioeconomic difference among friends while keeping his characters adorably realistic and his story tremendously entertaining!

It is actually a law that every review of the book Heart Stopper has to use the phrase swoon-worthy, and with good reason. This first love story is just that. The feeling of uncertainty, excitement and longing is perfectly rendered. The fact that it is two boys in an English public school, one of whom is very straight-seeming, just turns the simmer up a notch. This book won the Mass. Teen Choice Book Award last year in a landslide. 75% of the students in my school who took part voted for it, and that was before the Netflix series was released, which has only broadened its popularity. If you don’t go directly from book one all the way through the available titles (and then go onto the webcomic for yet to be published panels) you are clearly dead inside. 

Dragon Hoops is a gift from Gene Luen Yang to librarians everywhere. The combination of high school basketball, real life teen issues and the graphic novel format makes this a sure sell. It is thick, which can put off reluctant readers, but as soon as they see the panels, they are sold. This is Yang’s story of making the leap from high school teacher to full time graphic novel writer combined with the 2014-15 championship season of the Dragons - the basketball team at the school where he teaches. You wouldn’t think those two themes would mesh, but they really do. It is a great look at the background of the team (including a shocking look into allegations against one of the coaches that is handled perfectly) illustrated by a man who is trying to decide the future trajectory of his life.

All three of these are great for hooking readers and enlarging their world views.

Illustrated Books for Young Adults

Starry.ai is not killing it here...

Myers, W. and Grifalconi, A. Patrol, (2009), New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company. 

Preston, C. The War Bride’s Scrapbook, (2017) New York, NY: Ecco, HarperCollins Publishers.

Reynolds, J. and Griffin, J.  Ain't Burned All the Bright, (2022), New York, NY:Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books

These were an interesting collection to read together. 

Patrol is a straight-up picture book by the great Walter Dean Myers that is based on his time in Vietnam. He also touched on his experience in his work Fallen Angels, which, likely due to its verisimilitude, is on ALA’s frequently challenged book list. 

The text reads like a sad, sad poem and even though it isn’t text heavy, it conveys a great deal. The collages by Ann Grifalconi are powerful and emotionally evocative. At first, I thought it would be easy for this work to be mistaken for a children’s picture book, but on the second page, the reference to how the enemy “knows I am here to kill him” would hopefully put off any kids too young to understand the context. 

Speaking of brief text, Ain’t Burned All the Bright has only three sentences. And yet there is a tremendous amount of power in them. I read this book in a brew pub waiting for a librarian meet-up to start and when my first colleague showed up, he found me with tears streaming down my face. The combination of the covid-era lock-down setting with the background of the ill father, the tense mother, the older sister who is longing to change the world, the little brother falling behind and the narrator observing it all makes for a tsunami of emotions in a beautifully illustrated package. 

Call me shallow, but The War Bride’s Scrapbook was my favorite in this very strong field. I first encountered Caroline Preston through the delightful Jackie by Josie and her work as an archivist was visible in that work. Here she takes her collection of WW2 era ephemera and turns it into a compelling and informative story. This and her other visual novel The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt (equally adorable, but without as much emotional heft) are both cataloged in my library consortium as adult graphic novels, but I believe they both have teen appeal.

BECOMING RGB by Debbie Levy, illustrated by Whitney Gardner

Levy, D. and Gardner, W. Becoming RBG, (2019),  New York, NY:Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

Amy Santiago is one of my favorite fictional characters. She is a police officer on the show Brooklyn 99. Throughout the series, her character grew from a brown-nosing know-it-all to a fleshed out comedic delight. As a brown-nosing know-it-all, her character arc meant a lot to me. Hopefully, as we mature, we become more aware of how we are perceived by others and are able to reign in our more irritating attributes. 

I feel like Ruth, as portrayed in Becoming RGB, never managed to do this. She was PERFECT! And I adore RGB the human. And I actually really enjoyed this graphic biography. But I never felt like I got to like this Ruth. I think that the problem is that the secondary characters, primarily her mother and husband, were so fleshed out, where she was just brilliant, hard working and driven. Even Antonin Scalia seemed more like a real human than she did. 

This is not to say that this book isn’t fantastic, it is! It gives the facts of RGB’s life in an interesting narrative, I loved the look into her childhood and her marriage and the trajectory of her career. I know it is asking a lot of this format to bring her to life. 

Well, it is time for the SHUT MY MOUTH section of this response! I am a person who usually just focuses on text and doesn’t give much time to the pictures. Well, I just flipped back through the book to see if there was a part where I felt Ruth’s spirit on the page and I looked at the illustrations and there she was! The picture of her as a young mother sitting exhausted in a chair brings back the exact feeling of being a young mother sitting exhausted in a chair. Kudos to Whitney Gardner for making her emotions so visible. 

If you will excuse me, I need to go back and reread this with my picture glasses on!

HOW WE GOT TO THE MOON by John Rocco

Rocco, J. How We Got to the Moon,  (2020), New York, NY: Crown Books for Young Readers. 

This was a complete joy to read. The author/illustrator, John Rocco, spent much of his career as a Disney Imagineer and it shows. The illustrations are detailed and engaging. They have a feeling of movement to them that is ingenious. The text does its job exactly as intended and gives plenty of detail without being overwhelming. 

The book could easily be an entire course. As a matter of fact, as I read it, I started writing curriculum in my head. (What is wrong with me??) 

Rocco format changes up throughout the book in a way that will appeal to all kinds of readers. He features problem/solution scenarios, history, schematics, timelines, and he features individuals who were involved in the process out of the usual narrative sightline. He highlights people from groups that are not generally represented in the Apollo story. 

My husband is a giant NASA nerd and as a result, I know a lot more about the space program than I care about, but I kept coming across interesting details that were new to me. There is a strict “no reading out loud no matter how good it is” policy in my house, but my enjoyment of the book was so visible, that my spouse asked to look it over, which is nearly unheard of.

My only complaint about the book is the $30 price tag. Don’t get me wrong - it is worth every penny! But a class set would be completely unaffordable for any public school. But every school library K-12 would be well served to have a copy of this on their shelves.

ALL THIRTEEN: THE INCREDIBLE CAVE RESCUE OF THE THAI BOYS' SOCCER TEAM by Christina Soontornvat

Soontornvat, C. All 13: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys Soccer Team, (2020), Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press. 

This book is excellent. I know this to be true. That being said, I could care less about it from a personal perspective. Luckily, I am not a 7th grader! I think those kids will eat it up. It won a Siebert honor and a Newbery honor which says a lot about the quality. The story is zippy, the text is a manageable size and the pictures are immediate and fantastic. The size of the book will likely appeal to the kind of kid who wants to look like they are reading big books, but it also has great readability. 

I don’t love that there doesn’t seem to be a paperback in the works, at least according to the publisher. So many great middle grade nonfiction books really drag their heels on the path to becoming more affordable. 

The book reads like an adventure story, but it factors in that there are a lot of areas that kids might be compelled to learn about in addition to that narrative. Sections on “Buddhism in Thailand” and “Human Responses to Levels of Oxygen Concentration” add interesting color to the rest of the story. 

This book would have made more of an impression on me if I hadn’t read it right after John Rocco’s How We Got to the Moon, which is a masterpiece. That being said, any elementary or middle school library would do well to purchase this. It is a great conduit to teaching kids about religion, the human body, diving, rescues, soccer and any number of other interesting topics in a slick, smart package.

WE ARE NOT FREE by Tracy Chee

Chee, T. We Are Not Free, (2020) Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 

12 and up according to Amazon

If I had a dollar for every time a kid checked out We Are Not Free thinking it was a resource for their research paper about Japanese internment camps, well, I could probably get a grande latte at Starbucks at least. This book was on the Mass. Teen Choice Book Award list last year and everyone on the committee voted for its inclusion, which is extremely rare. 

The story is told in 14 different voices, each of them distinct and beautifully written. I listened to the audiobook version which was read by 11 different readers - all of Japanese descent. The characters’ monologues were interspersed with government documents and newspaper articles. The print version also had a handful of photographs, artifacts and illustrations. 

What I loved about this book is how it humanized all the kids and made them feel like real teenagers. Sure, they were being horribly treated by the government and their fellow citizens, but alongside that epic tragedy, they still had the everyday aspects of life - unsupportive parents, unrequited love, all the classics. And each kid felt like a real individual. I don’t know how much of that was the different voices and how much was the writing, but I believe they went hand in hand. 

This is a beautifully done book that was selected as a National Book Award finalist as well as a Printz Honor Book - and with good reason. I would recommend it for inclusion in any high school collection. It has been awhile since I read it, but I believe it is also middle school appropriate. From a curricular standpoint, it beautifully illustrates the impact of a draconian policy on teenagers in a way that would be accessible to modern teens.

CATHERINE'S WAR by Julia Billet, illustrated by Claire Fauvel

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1156451

Billet, C. Catherine’s War, (2020), New York, NY: Harper Alley, HarperCollins Publishers. 

Reading age ‏ : ‎ 8 - 12 years / Grade level ‏ : ‎ 3 - 7 according to Amazon

Catherine’s War is really Rachel’s war, but as a Jewish child trying to survive the holocaust, Catherine is a much safer name. The story is fairly linear and the visuals are amped up by the inclusion of Catherine/Rachel’s “photographs.” Generally when I am reading a graphic novel, I have to remind myself to consider the visuals, but this one demanded I look. 

The book was excellent at showing the depths of the war without being overtly violent. It looks more at the emotional trauma of a child survivor. The story is loosely based on Billet’s mother, who was much younger at the time, but was a student at the children's home in Sevres.

I have read a lot of YA and middle grade fiction about the holocaust, so there was not much here to surprise me except for the pedagogy of the Sevres children’s home. I loved it! The idea of students having so much autonomy over their education is fascinating to me. I was a little disappointed to discover this information on the school, “Great importance, then, was placed on personal observation, artistic expression, creativity, and individual autonomy. Yet the emotional shortcomings and artificial nature of this life without any contact with the outside world meant that many of its students had great difficulty adapting to adult life.” (Maurel, 2008).

I blame the war, not the pedagogy!

This book is an excellent work of historical fiction that got me thinking.

THE BLACK KIDS by Christina Hammonds Reed

Reed, C. The Black Kids, (2020) New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. 

grades 9-12 according to Amazon

“People glorify protest when white kids do it, when it’s chic, frustrated Parisian kids or British coal miners or suffragettes smashing windows and throwing firebombs at inequality. If white kids can run around wearing their bodies like they’re invincible, what do the rest of us do? Those of us who are breakable. Those of us who feel hopeless and frustrated and tired and sick of feeling this way again and again? Sometimes we just go ahead and break ourselves.”  

“I can’t tell if loneliness is being black, or being young or being a girl or if Lucia’s right and I need new friends. I don’t know. 

‘It might be lonelier / Without the loneliness,’ Emily wrote.

And she was white as shit.”

Those two quotes exemplify what I love about The Black Kids. 

This work of historical fiction, set in 1992 (when I was already an adult - please excuse me for a minute while I re-up on geritol and stool softener) looks at the Rodney King verdict and the response in Los Angeles through the eyes of a high school senior who is a black girl in a predominantly white upper-class school. Her parents are strivers who want nothing more than for their children to have a longer, sweeter childhood and better options for the future. They have achieved the American dream. Their kids are “soft.”

There is a lot going on in the book but what I loved is the way that the different threads strengthened each other. The parallel between Grandma Shirley’s likely mental illness and Jo’s is subtle but telling.  The way Ashley connects with Micheal vs. the way she connects with LaShawn is lovely. And the differences between Ashley’s old, gold mean-girl friends and the kind but messy Lana and the “black kids” is nuanced. 

I had to stop reading this for a couple days when I realized it was time for prom and the foreshadowing that something was definitely going to go down was overwhelming. The book didn’t pull punches. Ashley got a close up look at how racism is ingrained in society and it propelled her into a more thoughtful look at the burning of L.A. 

For a book about friendship where Ashley spends little or no time alone, there is a pervasive feeling of loneliness that seems to stem from her search for an identity that she can be proud of. 

This is a fascinating story set at a time in history that looked very different depending on your perspective. The differences between how Ashley perceives the riots as opposed to her formerly sheltered sister and her knowing cousin gives an excellent overview. 

This book broke my heart and educated me and it will do the same for teens who pick it up.