Dragon Hoops was not only a graphic novel, but a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang. And not just only any old graphic novel by him, but a First Second published one. All the big points were hit. The only thing I was not looking forward to was going to be the basketball aspect. But I figured that since Check, Please! by Ngozi Ukazu was not really about hockey, that maybe this was not really about basketball.
Oh, it is about basketball. But it is about one extremely special high school team. But not just when the book was started, it is how this team came to be, the coaches, players and how “today” (2015 of the story) came about. It is about how their struggles come about and how they solve them (or do not solve as the case might be). There is the present, history and the stories of the people you see walk onto the pages. Yang shows how growth happens even with adults, he shows the good and bad (he does not leave out Coach Phelps and his scandal, which is presented interestingly and realistically), and he is just showing people and life. This is a non-fiction story about how people become the person they are meant to be, but also how life makes them that person, too.
The history aspect of how basketball came to be is fresh and even exciting. I knew about a couple of peach buckets, but not why it happened, what came after or even how woman’s basketball came to light. Yang mentions the inequalities of women’s and men’s basketball, even today. We see how a couple kids from the inner city have “seen things,” how one kid from China realized being a big fish in a little pond can be bad but being just a fish in the big pond is also not easy, and how racism and sexism today is still rampant. We see sacrifices and we see how a graphic novel was born as an author was trying to live his life and balance teaching, comics (I mean, who says no to drawing/writing Superman?) and his family. We even see Yang jumping from the “book” and “real life” and the struggle he had with adding or not adding certain facts, or even a little artistic license with how something happened (the story about how one young man did not like how his hair looked in the cartoon form happened over text, not in person as shown).
The format is fun, unique, awkward, smooth. It is all that and more. I was unable to put it down, but at times it could be slow going. It is not an easy read, but a strong reader (graphic novel lover or not) aged 14 and up, could handle it. Yang’s style fits the storyline perfectly. You do not have to like basketball to enjoy this book as it is not about basketball. It is about the steps (literally and wonderfully illustrated by Yang) we must take to grow and survive. The backdrop of basketball was just how Yang was involved with this story. If there is one complaint, this graphic novel is extremely large and therefore, the reader copy was heavy. Make sure you workout before lifting it, or have a nice comfy table/desk to use!
Notes and a bibliography end the book.