{"id":32177,"date":"2020-01-24T08:00:50","date_gmt":"2020-01-24T13:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=32177"},"modified":"2020-01-24T08:00:50","modified_gmt":"2020-01-24T13:00:50","slug":"did-gene-luen-yang-make-me-love-basketball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=32177","title":{"rendered":"Did Gene Luen Yang Make Me Love Basketball?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve already written about how Gene Luen Yang’s Reading Without Walls Challenge made me love comics and graphic novels. Is it possible that he could make me love basketball as well?
\nI have to be honest, basketball is not my game. It all happens too fast, and I’m not really a sports person to begin with. In fact, this is my second semester with a kid\u00a0on a basketball team, and I pretty much watch the games without really “watching” the games.\u00a0Needless to say, I didn\u2019t expect to be completely enthralled by a 400 page basketball story. Nonetheless, I planned to at least dip into Dragon Hoops<\/em> because I love Gene Luen Yang\u2019s books, and I wanted to be able to talk about this new one.
\nI read the whole thing in one straight shot. Full of fascinating characters\u00a0whose individual stories build one on top of the other to form the rich backstory of a team with a chance\u2014a team on the verge of doing something great together.\u00a0Set at the Oakland Catholic high school school where Yang used to teach math, this is the story of an elite team chasing a championship that could change the futures of their star players and bring their dedicated coach long-awaited redemption. Hitting all those classic emotional notes of a great sports narrative and offering plenty of thrilling on-the-court action, this ambitious graphic novel interweaves the personal stories of the players with the history of the game itself and Yang\u2019s own creative journey as an author, a teacher, and a parent along the way.
\nThere\u2019s actually a lot of cool (not at all dry) history in here too, from the original invention of the sport in my erstwhile hometown of Springfield, MA to the inclusion of women at my alma mater Smith College (as long as they weren\u2019t too brash, too bold, or too athletic) to the tumultuous integration of African American players into the national league to the popularity of the game in China. One of the things I really love about Yang\u2019s approach in this capacious deep dive of a graphic novel, is the way he uses stories of individuals to build a larger sense of the Bishop O’Dowd High School team or the larger narrative of basketball itself. By opening these windows into basketball\u2019s past, we get to see its story\u00a0through\u00a0some of the players\u2014some insiders, some outsiders\u2014who\u2019ve fought their way onto the court and made the sport their own. It\u2019s not just specific basketball history that comes into play either. Whether it\u2019s the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson the night before a game or a Sikh player\u2019s reaction to a class assignment on Gandhi, Yang illuminates the ways that off-the-court tensions and the players\u2019 own histories inform their on-the-court game and build the real story of their team.
\nThe suspenseful sports montages are exciting, sure (Yang knows how to uses page turns to dramatic effect in the final seconds of a game). But it\u2019s the characters that really make this a fantastic read. Profiling players and coaches in turn, we get a fascinating, human look at the boys who carry the weight of this team on their shoulders. Since this is drawn from life, we don\u2019t always see further into their souls than want us to, which feels authentic to what getting to know teenage boys is like, but the anxieties and hopes and rivalries and idiosyncrasies of the kids we meet make the team\u2019s\u00a0quest irresistibly human. One of my favorite moments involves a player objecting to how his hair was being drawn in some of Yang\u2019s early posts on Tumblr\u2014and seeing his look evolve accordingly. It\u2019s a moment that reminds you these kids are real.
\nBut as much as I grew to love all the players, it\u2019s actually the character\u00a0of Gene Luen Yang,\u00a0as a comic book loving author\u00a0reluctantly pulled into the orbit of this team in spite of\u00a0himself that ultimately grounds and shapes the narrative.
\nAs any comic book (or sports) fan knows,\u00a0in a great superhero story, we should know who the heroes are\u2014and\u00a0those heroes should\u00a0always win, right?\u00a0But things happen in life that don\u2019t always fit that mold. Watching\u00a0the character of Gene Luen Yang wrestle with how complicated to allow his\u00a0story arc\u00a0to become\u00a0adds nuance and perspective to pieces of the story that aren\u2019t as easy to pin down.\u00a0And as the author himself tries to balance family responsibilities with teaching, writing opportunities, and his commitment to the team, he ends up reckoning in unexpected ways with the nature of heroism and courage, laying the\u00a0groundwork for a triumphant sports story arc that\u00a0feels\u00a0less about winning and more about people figuring\u00a0out\u00a0what it means to play the game.
\nWithout the added layer of the author’s journey, the book might read as simply a remarkably interesting, very well-crafted sports story. But, with it,\u00a0the narrative becomes about finding the guts to take risks when you need to be all-in and how to step back from things that aren’t a part of your endgame\u2014whether you’re a teacher looking to take the plunge as a full-time comic book artist or a pretty good player getting the most out of\u00a0one last\u00a0season\u00a0before refocusing on a future off the court. At the end of the day, Dragon Hoops <\/em>is about a lot of things at once, but at the core it\u2019s about figuring out what you want the most and finding a way to take that oh-so-scary first step. Plus, it might even\u00a0convert you into a basketball fan (at least for the duration)…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A sports averse bookseller finds a lot to love in ‘Dragon Hoops.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}