Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* There's a line between sports and American comics that is seldom crossed. Leave it to Yang to take the crucial step, capturing not only the excitement of basketball but something deep and universal about it, even as he parallels it with his own journey. Yang teaches at California's Bishop O'Dowd High School, home to the Dragons, a basketball team with a hallowed and, as it turns out, complicated history. Over and over again, the team almost wins State. Pursuing material for his next graphic novel, Yang surprises himself by latching onto the team and its long-time coach, Lou Richie. Yang traces the team's high-stakes season through the players but also delves into the history of basketball itself, touching on the sociopolitical forces that shaped it and—to no surprise for Yang's readers—the way race figures into both. Yang is an extraordinary cartoonist; his clean, clear, deceptively simple figures and compositions transmit emotions both subtle and powerful. Combining visual flair, like speeding backgrounds, with nearly diagrammatic movement, he creates pulse-pounding game sequences. Most important, through recurring visual motifs that connect a champion basketball player to a self-questioning artist to a Russian immigrant with a new idea, he illuminates the risks that every one of us must take and has, once again, produced a work of resounding humanity.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Seven years after best-selling, award-winning Yang's last release as both author and artist, his return is getting a big push, including a national author tour. Expect some March Madness around this one. Grades 8-12. Copyright 2020 Booklist Reviews.
BookPage Reviews
Best books for benchwarmers
You don't need to know your layups from your line drives to love these YA books.
The buzzer-beating jump shot. The walk-off home run. The scrappy gang of underdogs who surprise themselves by making it to the conference final. We've seen all these sports stories before—and for good reason. Even if you're not an athlete or much of a fan, it's hard to deny the drama of sporting events. Two new young adult books use sports as a springboard for exciting storytelling. These tales are as much about courage, teamwork and integrity as they are about the game itself.
★ Dragon Hoops
Cartoonist and former National Ambassador for Young People's Literature Gene Luen Yang would be the first to admit he's not much of a sports fan. As he confesses in his new graphic memoir, Dragon Hoops, he grew up as more of a fan of superhero stories, where you know that good will always triumph over evil. "In a well-crafted story, everything makes sense," Yang reflects. "Which is more than I can say for sports."
The book opens when Yang, who teaches math at Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland, California, begins to notice that the whole school is abuzz about the basketball team. Intrigued, Yang interviews Coach Lou, who tells Yang that after three straight years of losses, he is trying out a gutsy strategy—stacking his team roster with senior players—that might finally result in a state championship for the Dragons.
Over the course of the season, Yang travels with the O'Dowd Dragons, profiles many of the players (including some from the equally talented girls' team) and offers a brief history of basketball. As he gets to know the athletes, whose personalities develop into unforgettable characters, Yang confronts tough topics, such as the racism experienced by the team's Sikh and Chinese players.
Dragon Hoops epitomizes the best kind of storytelling possible in the comics format. Yang incorporates visual jokes that will reward careful readers and masterfully combines words and pictures to generate drama and suspense beyond what either could do independently. As his season with the Dragons comes to a close, Yang is inspired by the players and finds the courage to make a career-defining decision of his own.
★ We Are the Wildcats
Courage is also at the heart of Siobhan Vivian's We Are the Wildcats. The action in this field hockey-centered novel takes place not over the course of an entire season but over a single 24-hour period.
It opens on a hot day in August, as a week of team tryouts culminates in a final grueling workout, after which the team's charismatic and demanding coach will select 20 new Wildcats. Team captain Mel is eager to host the team's first Psych-Up of the season, a mandatory all-team slumber party at which new players will receive their varsity jerseys, but this year, Coach has something else in mind. Instead of letting the girls take charge as usual, Coach sends them on an all-night odyssey, causing old tensions and resentments from the prior season's humiliating finale to resurface, painful and raw.
Vivian's novel unfolds through six players' perspectives, including incoming freshman Luci (who is flattered and then outraged to be Coach's accomplice), injured Phoebe and goalie Ali, who eventually reveals the role that racism played in the previous season's heartbreaking loss. Creating different voices and backstories for this many primary characters isn't easy, but Vivian does so with aplomb, giving each Wildcat a credible and memorable personality.
As the teammates gradually open up and share their experiences of Coach's history of emotional manipulation and outright lies, they begin to imagine a new way to seize their own power and reclaim this important season for themselves.
Both Dragon Hoops and We Are the Wildcats are stories in which happy endings are not foregone conclusions, and the "good guys" aren't guaranteed to win—but that's part of what makes them engrossing, right up to the final play.
Copyright 2020 BookPage Reviews.Horn Book Guide Reviews
Color by Lark Pien. Art assists by Rianne Meyers and Kolbe Yang. I'm just not a sports kind of guy, begins Yang in this comics-format offering that brilliantly combines journalism, memoir, and sports history. Yang, who taught math at Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland, California, during the events of the book, provides readers with an inside look at the school's elite basketball team's season as it attempted to win the California State Championship in 2015. Weaving the details of that team's efforts with a primer on the history of basketball, Yang skillfully juggles the stories of multiple players and coaches as well as his own journey from basketball novice to avid fan. In the appended notes, Yang explains his art and narrative choices chapter-by-chapter with page and panel notations, from the sneakers and the hairstyles of the individual players to times when certain conversations happened differently than depicted. While the action on the court is absolutely transfixing (with page layouts often using trapezoid-shaped panels whose diagonal lines amp up the dynamism), the story shines just as brightly off the court when Yang's focus shifts to his own dilemmas and profound insights regarding art and storytelling. Single-season reportage is a popular subgenre of sports writing in the adult publishing world (try In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle for a basketball classic), and here is a perfect entryway into this form for teen readers. A bibliography is also appended. Copyright 2021 Horn Book Guide Reviews.
Horn Book Magazine Reviews
"I'm just not a sports kind of guy," begins Yang in this comics-format offering that brilliantly combines journalism, memoir, and sports history. Yang, who taught math at Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland, California, during the events of the book, provides readers with an inside look at the school's elite basketball team's season as it attempted to win the California State Championship in 2015. Weaving the details of that team's efforts with a primer on the history of basketball, Yang skillfully juggles the stories of multiple players and coaches as well as his own journey from basketball novice to avid fan. In the appended notes, Yang explains his art and narrative choices chapter-by-chapter with page and panel notations, from the sneakers and the hairstyles of the individual players to times when certain conversations happened differently than depicted. While the action on the court is absolutely transfixing (with page layouts often using trapezoid-shaped panels whose diagonal lines amp up the dynamism), the story shines just as brightly off the court when Yang's focus shifts to his own dilemmas and profound insights regarding art and storytelling. Single-season reportage is a popular subgenre of sports writing in the adult publishing world (try In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle for a basketball classic), and here is a perfect entryway into this form for teen readers. A bibliography is also appended. Eric Carpenter May/June 2020 p.145 Copyright 2020 Horn Book Magazine Reviews.
Kirkus Reviews
The trials of a high school basketball team trying to clinch the state title and the graphic novelist chronicling them. The Dragons, Bishop O'Dowd High School's basketball team, have a promising lineup of players united by the same goal. Backed by Coach Lou Richie, an alumnus himself, this could be the season the Oakland, California, private Catholic school breaks their record. While Yang (Team Avatar Tales, 2019, etc.), a math teacher and former National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, is not particularly sporty, he is intrigued by the potential of this story and decides to focus his next graphic novel on the team's ninth bid for the state championship. Yang seamlessly blends a portrait of the Dragons with the international history of basketball while also tying in his own career arc as a graphic novelist as he tries to balance family, teaching, and comics. Some panels directly address the creative process, such as those depicting an interaction between Yang and a Punjabi student regarding the way small visual details cue ethnicity in different ways. This creative combination of mem oir and reportage elicits questions of storytelling, memory, and creative liberty as well as addressing issues of equity and race. The full-color illustrations are varied in layout, effectively conveying intense emotion and heart-stopping action on the court. Yang is Chinese American, Richie is black, and there is significant diversity among the team members. A winner. (notes, bibliography) (Graphic nonfiction. 13-18) Copyright Kirkus 2020 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
As a comic book enthusiast and graphic novelist, Printz Medalist Yang has always been more partial to superheroes than to sports. But in 2014, as a teacher at a Catholic high school in Oakland, Calif., Yang is drawn to a story about the school's basketball team—the Dragons. Rumor has it that under the current coach, a former player at the school, this year's team will surely grab the state championship. Shadowing the group for an entire season, Yang interviews players and coaches to uncover the talented students' stories and the program's allegedly shadowed past. Using documentary-style storytelling, Yang serves as both narrator and a character, alternating player backstories and the Dragons' 2014 season with interstitials about the sport's beginnings and early tensions, historical and present-day discrimination (Black Lives Matter, Sikh persecution following the partition of India), and Yang's own work-life balance. Using a candid narrative and signature illustrations that effectively and dynamically bring the fast-paced games to life, Yang has crafted a triumphant, telescopic graphic memoir that explores the effects of legacy and the power of taking a single first step, no matter the outcome. Ages 14–up.
SLJ Express Reviews