One, told in black and white line art with red backgrounds, follows thirteen-year-old Tiên Phong, who attends middle school with his best friend Claire and their jock friend Julian in 1998. The Magic Fish begins as a pair of alternating stories. Its happy endings (and there are several) could warm up a frozen room. Like them, it’s a thing of surpassing, sweet, credible beauty, at once realistic in its treatment of human emotions and out-of-this-world in terms of what readers can see. Nguyen’s debut flew-or swam in the air-from my hands to the very small shelf of all-ages graphic novels I buy in multiples and give to everybody, alongside Laura Lee Gulledge’s Page by Paige and Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam. And that’s without even mentioning the line art or color. This first narrative work from the accomplished Minnesota-based illustrator Trung Le Nguyen folds European and Vietnamese fairy tales (among them “Cinderella” and “The Little Mermaid”) into a braid that also includes realist stories about a second generation immigrant childhood about parents who do their best and still sometimes fall down about middle-school friendships that (amazingly) work out about modern and wartime Vietnam and-not to be forgotten-about kisses, love stories and happy endings, some of which are gay as all get out. Or-in a less colloquial, wordier way- The Magic Fish is everything I want at the moment in a graphic novel, especially in one meant for both kids and adults to read.
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