Name: The Shadow Hero
Price: 11.59 USD
Availability: InStock
Rating: 4.6 (147 reviews)

Product Description


Gene Luen Yang is the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature and is a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of what's popularly known as the MacArthur "Genius" Grant.A New York Times bestsellerIn the comics boom of the 1940s, a legend was born: the Green Turtle. He solved crimes and fought injustice just like the other comics characters. But this mysterious masked crusader was hiding something more than your run-of-the-mill secret identity... The Green Turtle was the first Asian American super hero.The comic had a short run before lapsing into obscurity, but Gene Luen Yang, the acclaimed author of American Born Chinese, and Sonny Liew, the author of the New York Times-bestseller The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, have finally revived this character in Shadow Hero, a new graphic novel that creates an origin story for the Green Turtle.This gorgeous, funny comics adventure for teens is a new spin on the long, rich tradition of American comics lore.


From School Library Journal


Gr 7 Up—Award-winning author Yang and artist Liew tackle a lesser-known aspect of history, breathing new life into the Green Turtle, a 1940s comic book hero. According to lore, the Green Turtle was originally drawn to be Chinese, but publishers quashed artist Chu Hing's plans, and Hing rebelled by drawing his hero so that his face was never visible. The Green Turtle is cast as an unlikely 19-year-old young man, Hank, the son of Chinese immigrants who own a grocery store in 1940s America. When his mother is rescued by a superhero, the loving but overbearing woman decides that it's Hank's fate to become a hero himself, and she does everything in her power to push her son in that direction. Though Hank initially shies away from assuming the role of caped crusader, when tragedy strikes, he's eventually inspired to call himself the Green Turtle, and fight back against gangsters who have been intimidating his family and many others in Chinatown. Liew's scratchy, action-packed illustrations have a nostalgia-tinged vibe ideal for the gritty/hard-boiled setting, and Yang plays expertly with clichés and stereotypes about Chinese culture without ever becoming heavy-handed or obvious. A detail about the four spirits of China, one of whom allies himself with Hank's father and then Hank, injects an element of magic and of Chinese history and mythology that made Yang's American Born Chinese (First Second, 2001) such a layered and complex work. A creative take on the superhero genre. [See author Q&A, p. 20.]—Mahnaz Dar, School Library Journal


From Booklist


*Starred Review* In the 1940s, the golden age of comic books, Chu Hing, a little-known Chinese American cartoonist—very likely the first ever—created the Green Turtle, a superhero tasked with protecting China from invading Japanese forces. Though the comic ran for only five issues, Yang uses Chu Hing’s Green Turtle as a launching pad for this story of young Hank Chu, a Chinese American teen in the 1930s who becomes a hero in his Chinatown neighborhood. In a loving spoof of classic superhero origin stories, Hank is exposed to toxic radiation, visits a mystic, and is bitten by an animal used for science experiments before simply working hard at becoming a good fighter. It isn’t until he is faced with real tragedy and inherits the wish-granting turtle spirit who lived in his father’s shadow that he becomes a real hero, the Green Turtle. There’s plenty of humor in this lively, entertaining adventure story, and it capitalizes on the dashing bravado of golden-age comics, particularly in Liew’s stylish pages, full of inky outlines and dramatic paneling. At its heart, though, this book is a subtle comment on China’s changing cultural landscape and growing multiculturalism in America. A lovingly tongue-in-cheek homage. Grades 8-12. --Sarah Hunter


Review


"What America needs is for people to shed the expectation of translation and immerse themselves in other worlds . . . America has to start some

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