Along the way, he finds commonality with the current coach at his school, and begins to become more and more invested in the players. In one panel, Yang asks himself: “Am I really gonna spend the next few years of my life working on a graphic novel about basketball?” (p. In a moment in which he draws himself wearing a superhero shirt, the author ponders his next creative work, and if he can truly tell a story about basketball. As a reader who has never been a sports fan, I can relate to this, and yet found myself willing to read a graphic novel of over 400 pages about a sport.

The author is, in fact, not a sports fan, but finds a set of powerful ideas and messages in the sport of basketball. Yang writes freely about his own reluctance to write the book at certain moments. One of the first moves I would make as a teacher with this book is exploring its thematic content with a bit of personal reflection. With each lesson step, I've offered a lesson prompt that teachers can consider using to elicit discussion with students, as I believe these are conversations we must have as educators. Part of the power of this book is the way Yang uses basketball as a centre for discussing cultural change and racial equality.

In this article, I offer a few steps in terms of a reader guide and lesson plan to use with the book for literacy instruction. To achieve realism, Yang occasionally inserts expletives, but leaves out letters so that the implication of the word is present without the actual term, opening up the book for younger audiences, as well. Yang is perhaps best known for his previous work, American Born Chinese and as the author of the also recently-released Superman Smashes the Klan, and has served as the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature here in the US.ĭragon Hoops holds powerful potential for engaging adolescent readers, and the text is accessible for this age group. I recently had the chance to read Dragon Hoops, a newly-released graphic novel from Gene Luen Yang.

Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang