Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang

I heard about this being a great graphic novel about basketball, and since I haven't read many graphic novels (okay, just one, but I've spent a lot of time getting graphic novels for my boys so I feel like it's been more than that). This was an interesting story because I felt like it could have worked really well as an regular book written with words and no illustrations. Yang is writing the story of the varsity basketball team at the high school at which he teaches, but he works in parts about the history of basketball, the history of basketball with different racial and ethnic groups in America, basketball in China, and the school itself. Yang also works in a lot of personal aspects of his own story, like his decision to stop teaching to work fully on comics, and his wrestling with accepting a new opportunity to do the Superman comics. I feel like there were some things I would have maybe taken out to focus more on the basketball and the storyline of the championship, but I guess he had some good reasons to include that stuff. I thought the graphic novel format was an interesting choice, but I really enjoyed that part of it. I was thinking about giving it to Dane to read, but there is a bunch of swearing (written with symbols, but still) and I think he will be more interested in it when he is older anyways. (The best part of the graphic novel is how quickly it went--it was a huge, 400+-page book, but it only took a few hours to get through.)