Dragon Hoops

 

Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang. Grades 6 and up. First Second. March 2020. 448 pages. Reviewed from digital galley provided by publisher. Due out March 17 - preorder now and get this on your shelves in time for March Madness!

I live in basketball country. High school and college basketball is absolutely huge here in Southern Indiana. And I just read a book that I am for sure adding to my shelves because I know I will have an audience for it, and I think you will, too.

You know Gene Luen Yang from his Printz-winning American Born Chinese and his National-Book-Award-shortlisted Boxers and Saints and now he's back with a new book that's a rather unusual memoir of sorts. And it's a very unlikely book for him to have written.

What it's about:

Mr. Yang is not a fan of basketball, or of sports in general. He's a comics nerd, the kid who was always made fun of on the basketball court, a guy more at home at an artist's table than a stadium. But as he was searching for his next book idea, he kept hearing the students at the high school where he taught talking about their basketball team. So, he took a step across the street to the school's gym to check it out.

And so begins Mr. Yang's year of basketball. He follows a team of stellar players and a coach who's brought his team to the California State Championships five times without winning the championship. Could this be their year? With eight seniors on the team, it had better be.

My thoughts: 

This is a fantastic book that Yang's many fans will appreciate and it's sure to garner him new fans, as well. Part action-packed sports story, part character-driven portrait of this dedicated high school team (and their teachers), and part sports history, this is a graphic novel that has a little something for everyone.

Yang includes personal stories of all the teens on the team and why basketball matters in their lives. It's a very diverse group of California students who had many different paths to attending this private, Catholic high school, but they come together to make one cohesive team.

Although at its heart this is a sports story, Yang interperses the team's story with his own personal story of taking steps forward into the unknown. Throughout the book the theme of taking a small step that changes your life comes back again and again. You never know where a small step might lead. For Mr. Yang, his small step across the street to the school gym eventually led to his decision to quit teaching and move to writing and creating full time, a decision he wrestles with throughout the book.

While that part of the story may sound like a story only an adult audience would appreciate, Yang treats his teen subjects with such respect and honesty that this is truly a teen book with huge crossover potential. Sports fans will definitely appreciate this book, but there's a lot for the nerdy quiet kids who don't care about basketball, too.

Readalikes:

Press this into the hands of teens who enjoyed Attucks!: Oscar Robertson and the Basketball Team That Awakened a City by Philip Hoose (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2018). While Dragon Hoops is a graphic novel and Attucks! is prose nonfiction, both profile diverse elite basketball teams with plenty of play-by-play action mixed with a good dose of basketball history. 

A One-Sitting Read

One of the categories for Book Riot's 2018 Read Harder Challenge is "a one-sitting book". That's really hard for me. I tend to be a distracted reader. I need to take breaks. I need to put it down for awhile and do something else. I very rarely finish a book all in one go unless I'm doing a weekend reading challenge. Even when I was serving on the Newbery Committee, I was much more likely to read half of a book and put it down and start another and then finish up the first book the next day.

So, when I tell you that this book was nearly a one-sitting read for me, I want you to know what that means. My husband and I are currently working our way through Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix (which I have never seen and am hugely enjoying) and I even turned down watching episodes to read this book.

Educated by Tara Westover is a memoir from a woman with an unusual upbringing. Brought up by off-the-grid end-of-days-preppers on a remote mountain in Idaho, Tara was never vaccinated, never saw a doctor or dentist, and didn't even have a birth certificate until she was 9 years old. And she never went to school. Her mother attempted homeschool from time to time, but there was always too much work to be done at her father's scrap metal business for a real education to take place.

When abuse from family members escalated, Tara knew that she needed a way out. Some of her older siblings had found ways out: marriage, jobs... and her older brother Tyler had gone to college. Tara began to dream of going to college, too. But that dream seemed impossible. She had never taken an exam in her life, but now would have to ace the ACT to be considered by colleges. She had never studied or written an essay. She had never heard of the Holocaust or the Civil Rights Movement.

It's not really a spoiler to tell you that she makes it out. In fact, Tara Westover went on to not only complete her Bachelor's degree but to study overseas and eventually earn a PhD. It only makes her unusual upbringing that much more fascinating to know how she ultimately went on to live a very different life.

I mean, what Tara and her family members endured... I couldn't look away from this book, even as it completely disturbed me. I completely take for granted that if a horrifying accident happened to me or someone around me, we'd go to the hospital. That wasn't an option for the Westovers. And they just kept surviving medical trauma that I thought for sure would kill them.

Like, I knew Tara would eventually be at least relatively okay because I knew she had gone on to write this book. But I had to read it to believe it and to see how she would possibly escape.

Readalikes:

Hand this book to folks who enjoyed memoirs about others with unusual or traumatic childhoods like The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls or A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer. Although this book is published for adults, I think there's a great deal of crossover appeal for teens, particularly teens who enjoyed either of these readalike memoirs.

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover. Random House, February 2018. 352 pages. Reviewed from ARC provided by publisher.