Dragon Hoops
By Gene Luen Yang
Hi! Has there ever been a time in your life when you truly disliked something? Well, Gene has disliked basketball all of his life. However, a possible story intrigues him as a writer and forces him to face his fears about basketball.
Bishop O’Dowd High School has a losing streak in basketball. They have played amazingly well in the regular season, but when it gets to the State Championship, they always lose! They’ve lost 8 years in a row – this will be the 9th time that they’re going back. This is a story about the team’s hard work and dedication that all leads up to that final championship game. This book actually has the author in it. The graphic novel is composed of all of his interviews and things that he learned, and it’s just as much their story as it is his.
This is a great book, and I struggled to think of anything that I would change. However, there was one part that was a little confusing for me. It’s when Gene’s wife is talking to him about how graphic novels are lies. And then, it turns out that it’s Gene’s subconscious that’s really talking to him and it’s two parts of a debate. It keeps changing back and forth from Gene’s wife to two kids to Gene himself, and I feel that it could have been a little clearer than he made it.
My favorite part of Dragon Hoops is when Gene (the author/narrator) finally gets the courage to go to Coach Lou’s office and discovered his next story. Gene and Lou develop a great bond throughout the story that I love, and without that bond, this book would not have been written.
This book is honestly very unique. I can’t think of a book that I’ve ever read that’s like it. I haven’t read a lot of graphic novels, so that may be the reason that I can’t come up with a similar book to compare it to. This book is unique because Gene, the author, is one of the main characters in the book. How many books have you read (that are not auto-biographies) where the author is the main character? I’ve read one: Dragon Hoops.
Will the O’Dowd Dragons take home a championship? Or will they lose again, just like they lost the past 8 years? As I always say, read the book to find out!
A few helpful things I like to say about the books I read:
“Run and Get Mom” (how I describe the scariness factor – zero being not scary at all and five being majorly scary): 1
“Yucky-Lovey Stuff” (how I describe the romance factor – zero having no yucky-lovey parts in it and five having major yucky-lovey parts): 0
I give this book 5 wands.
This book was great! I absolutely loved it! You can see how Gene progresses throughout the story and becomes a different person than he was at the beginning.
