A lighthearted tale with black and brown characters, matter-of-fact Brooklyn bilingualism, and a solid message of creating...
Graphic novelist Mercado celebrates the joy of hip-hop.
This fun, candy-colored Afrofuturist saga set in 1980s Brooklyn introduces 13-year-old budding DJ Wax; his ice cream truck–vendor uncle Rashaad (he swears in ice cream flavors); his pizza-deliverer–turned–best-friend, Cooky P; and his brainy, truth-telling little sister The D, the tale’s real hero. The story opens as Wax produces a colossal sonic disaster (according to his family) for his crush, Pirate Polly. The lovingly honest criticism spurs Wax to try again—and, in the process, he transports them all to a Blade Runner–inspired world called Discopia, accidentally kills King Chug Chug, its ruler, and calls forth a mentor, Kabuki Snowman, who teaches the teenager Sci-Fu, described as “a mix between a martial art and a musical instrument…to manipulate and modulate the sound waves around you” in order to defeat the king’s son Choo Choo and his mixed-gender crew, the Five Deadly Dangers. This trippy, psychedelic adventure, with chapters labeled like album tracks, is as much a call and response to Vijay Prashad’s Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting (2002) and a riff on astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson’s comment that all of the universe is literally made of stardust as it is a not-so-subtle visual reference to Samurai Jack’s villain Aku and a nod to Get Out’s lifesaving-friendship trope.
A lighthearted tale with black and brown characters, matter-of-fact Brooklyn bilingualism, and a solid message of creating through failure and love. (Graphic science fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62010-472-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Oni Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Problem-solving through perseverance and friendship is the real win in this deeply smart and inspiring story.
Leaving Brooklyn behind, Black math-whiz and puzzle lover Bree starts a new life in Florida, where she’ll be tossed into the deep end in more ways than one. Keeping her head above water may be the trickiest puzzle yet.
While her dad is busy working and training in IT, Bree struggles at first to settle into Enith Brigitha Middle School, largely due to the school’s preoccupation with swimming—from the accomplishments of its namesake, a Black Olympian from Curaçao, to its near victory at the state swimming championships. But Bree can’t swim. To illustrate her anxiety around this fact, the graphic novel’s bright colors give way to gray thought bubbles with thick, darkened outlines expressing Bree’s deepest fears and doubts. This poignant visual crowds some panels just as anxious feelings can crowd the thoughts of otherwise star students like Bree. Ultimately, learning to swim turns out to be easy enough with the help of a kind older neighbor—a Black woman with a competitive swimming past of her own as well as a rich and bittersweet understanding of Black Americans’ relationship with swimming—who explains to Bree how racist obstacles of the past can become collective anxiety in the present. To her surprise, Bree, with her newfound water skills, eventually finds herself on the school’s swim team, navigating competition, her anxiety, and new, meaningful relationships.
Problem-solving through perseverance and friendship is the real win in this deeply smart and inspiring story. (Graphic fiction. 10-13)Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-305677-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperAlley
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
An engrossing, humorous, and vitally important graphic novel that should be required reading in every middle school in...
Jordan Banks takes readers down the rabbit hole and into his mostly white prep school in this heartbreakingly accurate middle-grade tale of race, class, microaggressions, and the quest for self-identity.
He may be the new kid, but as an African-American boy from Washington Heights, that stigma entails so much more than getting lost on the way to homeroom. Riverdale Academy Day School, located at the opposite end of Manhattan, is a world away, and Jordan finds himself a stranger in a foreign land, where pink clothing is called salmon, white administrators mistake a veteran African-American teacher for the football coach, and white classmates ape African-American Vernacular English to make themselves sound cool. Jordan’s a gifted artist, and his drawings blend with the narrative to give readers a full sense of his two worlds and his methods of coping with existing in between. Craft skillfully employs the graphic-novel format to its full advantage, giving his readers a delightful and authentic cast of characters who, along with New York itself, pop off the page with vibrancy and nuance. Shrinking Jordan to ant-sized proportions upon his entering the school cafeteria, for instance, transforms the lunchroom into a grotesque Wonderland in which his lack of social standing becomes visually arresting and viscerally uncomfortable.
An engrossing, humorous, and vitally important graphic novel that should be required reading in every middle school in America. (Graphic fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-269120-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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