Like the standard Lion Dancers featured of their attractive Lunar New Year Love Story, graphic novel veterans Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham mix their appreciable abilities, bringing a young love story to life. Yang’s writing and Pham’s illustrations mix seamlessly to introduce readers to Vietnamese American Val (quick for Valentina) and her on-again, off-again relationship with love.
Valentine’s Day has all the time been Val’s favourite—it’s her namesake—and as a child, she embraces the vacation wholeheartedly: making valentines for all her classmates, talking blessings over each, and even sending her dad a valentine from her mother in heaven. But when a crushing pronouncement from her estranged grandmother reveals a large lie in Val’s life, every part falls to items. Soon, Val has misplaced her religion in love. Then she meets Les, “hands down the prettiest boy” she has ever seen, on the Lunar New Year competition, and she or he decides to offer herself one 12 months earlier than she provides up on her coronary heart for good. Will Les be the real love she’s been in search of?
“Once you have the familiar, you can weave in the unfamiliar.” Read our interview with Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham.
While the bulk of the narrative takes place throughout Val’s junior and senior years of highschool, Lunar New Year Love Story will enchantment to a broad viewers, together with youthful teenagers. Though it’s a love story, it embraces all types of love: romantic, sure, but in addition familial, intergenerational, non secular and the particular love between trusted pals. All these variations of love get examined, and readers will hope together with Val as she makes an attempt to flee her household’s doomed relationship historical past. Yang writes wholly actual youngsters: reflective and impulsive; looking for whereas nonetheless assured; conscious of their potential to harm and be harm. Yang’s Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese teen characters share numerous cultural views as they discover the artwork of lion dancing. Their academics insist: “It isn’t just a dance. If you’re doing it right? It’s as if you two become one animal, with one heart.”
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