Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Bears and Burnout

Angelica and the Bear Prince by Trung Le Nguyen

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Angelica is an overachiever. She can’t help herself. She loves to be counted as someone people can rely on. But she’s not relying on her body failing her, and after burnout leaves her too numb to do much else besides lie in bed, she gets into therapy and decides to choose one project to focus on instead of ALL the projects! She lands an internship at a local theatre which is celebrating its anniversary by mounting its very first show, an adaptation of East of the […]

Not as magical for me as it has been for others

The Magic Fish by Trung le Nguyen

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Maybe I’m broken, because I didn’t find this as winning as seemingly everybody else. I liked the way they weaved together fairy tales with bits of both the past and the present but, I don’t know, I guess I wanted more. More what, you ask? More time with these characters and less time with the fairy tales. Tien’s coming out tale was what resonated with me the most, so I found myself getting frustrated when it would dip back into a fairy tale. I kept […]

Magically Heartwarming

The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen

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Crystalclear recommended The Magic Fish to me for it’s fairytales and the beautiful illustrations. And she couldn’t have been more right. Trung Le Nguyen weaves a heartwarming story of Tien and his mother, two Vietnamese immigrants living in the US who are trying to navigate language, culture, and coming of age while battling loneliness and family duty. Tien’s mother asks him to read her fairytales to help her with her English, and as they unfold, they remind her of how the fairytales are different in Vietetamese […]

So Lovely

The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen

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The Magic Fish is an absolutely beautiful graphic novel–both the pictures and the story itself. It’s the story of a boy, Tiến, whose been keeping a secret from his friends and family. Tiến’s parents emigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam. His parents are working on improving their English, and so every night he reads fairy tales with his mother. Meanwhile, he tries to figure out how to cross the language barrier to tell his parents that he’s gay. To help his mother with her English, she […]

Worth the hype!

The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen

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The Magic Fish By Trung Le Nguyen   I knew this book had won awards going in, but I wasn’t really sure what to expect.  Whatever awards this got, it most definitely deserved!   Going in, I knew that it was about a Vietnamese boy, Tíển, struggling to find the words to come out to his parents, while bonding with them over fairy tales.  But it is so much more than that.  It is a story about family and immigration and survival.  It’s about acceptance […]

“The space between two shores is the ocean and being caught in between feels like drowning.”

The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen

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A new forever favorite! If you like your fairy tales dark, and reading other cultural versions of them, read this book! If you like your graphic novels lush, detailed, and darling, read this book! If you like compelling family stories, immigrant stories, and queer characters, read this book! In the forefront of Trung Le Nguyen’s graphic novel is the story of a middle schooler named Tiên who is quietly dealing with coming out and his crush on a friend.  Alongside that is his mother’s story, […]



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