Boxers/Saints - Yang, Gene Luen
Summary: Vibiana, an unwanted fourth child, finds her name and identity in Christianity, but with the Boxer Rebellion in full swing and Chinese Christians facing death, she must decide whether her loyalties lie with her religion or her country.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* In American Born Chinese (2006), Yang spoke to the culture clash of Chinese American teen life. In Saints—the concluding volume in a two-book set beginning with Boxers (2013)—about the Boxer Rebellion at the end of the nineteenth century in China, he looses twin voices in harmony and dissonance from opposite sides of the bloody conflict. Saints follows Four-Girl, an outcast in her own family, who embraces the Christian faith spreading through her country and places herself in the dangerous path of the Boxers. Between the two books, Yang ties tangled knots of empathy where the heroes of one become the monsters of the other. Four-Girl and her foil in Boxers, Little Bao, are drawn by the same fundamental impulses—for community, family, faith, tradition, purpose—and their stories reflect the inner torture that comes when those things are threatened. Yang is in superb form here, arranging numerous touch points of ideological complexity and deeply plumbing his characters' points of view. And in an homage to the driving power of stories themselves, Four-Girl is captivated by a vision sprung from lore: a young Frenchwoman clad in golden armor, Joan of Arc. Much blood is spilled as Four-Girl marches toward her grim fate, which is even more unsettling given that Yang hasn't fundamentally altered his squeaky clean, cartoonishly approachable visual style. A poignant, powerhouse work of historical fiction from one of our finest graphic storytellers. Copyright 2013 Booklist Reviews.
Check Availability
