Stories can make you sigh for all sorts of reasons. Frustration, contentment, resolve. Angelica and the Bear Prince, published by Random House Graphix in October 2025, pulls a deep, comforting, swoon-like sigh from the reader, at least this reader. This is a cup of cocoa of a graphic novel. A warm, joint popping hug of a graphic novel. A fully broken-in hoodie of a graphic novel. It’s the best kind of sweet, romantic, comfort read.
Angelica and the Bear Prince, author/illustrator Trung Le Nguyen’s follow up to the award winning The Magic Fish, is a very loose reimagining of the Norwegian fairy tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon. It follows Angelica, Jelly to her friends, who is picking herself back up after hitting a pretty serious burnout wall. Jelly is an over-achiever and a people-pleaser who got so wrapped up in her desperation not to disappoint people that she ran herself right into the ground.
With perfect timing for her to realign herself, Jelly gets an internship at the theater company that was her happy place as a child. She gets to spend the whole winter stage managing her favorite play with her best friend Christine who is starring opposite the play’s lead and the theater’s mascot Peri the bear in Jelly’s favorite play. The mascot whose social media account Jelly has developed a pen pal style relationship with. The mascot who is embodied by a figure from Jelly’s past who is desperate to reconnect with her. The reveal here and the shift in their relationship takes a while to develop but is so, so satisfying.
Per Nguyen, this is a story about grief and it drips off every page. The grief that comes with growing up, grief of mourning a loved one, grief of dealing with mental health struggles. And with all that heaviness, this is an incredibly light, hopeful graphic, partially because of Nguyen’s stunning art. The illustrations are like a manga processed through a Disney lens, giving the graphic a bright, beautiful flow that is incredibly easy to read. The characters feel lived in and real and their hopes and struggles are incredibly relatable. The story is romantic and sweet and so beautifully told.
One of my favorite things about this graphic is that all the characters are given room to grow. So frequently in stories like this anyone who is not the central romantic couple just fade into the background, but Nguyen doesn’t fall into that. Jelly’s mom, still mourning the loss of her own mother, is anxious and uncertain and desperate to help her daughter grow while keeping Jelly her little girl. The stern manager of the theater is learning how to keep loving after their own loss and massive life changes. Christine, who easily could have been relegated to the barely-seen-best-friend role or the focus of Jelly’s jealous for landing the lead role of the Princess in the play, is a ride or die bestie throughout both being there for Jelly to lean on and going to her for support when she realizes her relationship isn’t what she deserves.
Angelica and the Bear Prince is such a lovely, cozy graphic. Teens and preteens alike can easily get wrapped into the romance and coming of age elements of the story and the focus on transformation and growth. It’s a legit pleasure to read.
Angelica and the Bear Prince By Trung Le Nguyen Penguin Random House Graphic, 2025 ISBN: 9781984892669
Company Age Rating: 12+
NFNT Age Recommendation: Older Teen (16-18), Teen (13-16), Tween (10-13) Creator Representation: Vietnamese, Nonbinary , Character Representation: South Asian, Trans, Anxiety, Depression
Tai Pham isn’t looking for trouble. He’s just living his life: helping in his beloved grandmother’s store, filling sketchbooks with drawings, and hanging out with his best friends. But sometimes, trouble finds him anyway, like when vandals target the store with thrown bricks and racist graffiti. Or when his grandmother passes away, and her jade ring starts following Tai around. It seems he’s been chosen to take over her role as a Green Lantern. But how can Tai become a member of a superpowered intergalactic peacekeeping force? He’s only thirteen!
The Green Lantern Corps is skeptical about bringing in a recruit so young. Still, they begin to train him, teaching him how to use his powers. But Tai has to keep up with his regular life, too. Which is how he and his two closest friends interview billionaire entrepreneur Xander Griffin. Why would a man like him take the time to talk to a group of kids working on a school project? Well, it turns out Xander Griffin knew Tai’s grandmother. What exactly was the connection? And what about Griffin’s plans to revitalize and remake Tai’s neighborhood? Should Tai be excited, or worried?
The story in Green Lantern: Legacy is fairly simple, as origin stories often are, especially when aimed at kids. However, it touches on some big themes: looking out for others, learning to trust and rely on your friends, and being willing to challenge authority when necessary. The story also spotlights the conflict that can arise between innovation and tradition. Will Tai support a top-down revamp of his neighborhood that could make it safer, but would also strip the citizens of their privacy and the community of its identity? Or will he follow in his grandmother’s footsteps, doing the hard, slow work to improve the neighborhood from the ground up?
Tai Pham is the first Asian-American Green Lantern, part of DC’s welcome diversification of the franchise. Minh Lê and Andie Tong have found many ways to naturally incorporate Tai’s Vietnamese-American identity into the story. His grandmother describes using her Green Lantern abilities to help her family and others safely come to America during wartime. Tai’s family encounters racism, as when vandals spray-paint the words “go home” on his grandmother’s store. Characters sometimes use Vietnamese terms, which are translated in a glossary at the end of the story. When he and his friends redesign his Green Lantern costume, the ever-artistic Tai adds some Vietnamese-style flair.
Familiarity with the Green Lantern franchise is not a requirement for enjoying this book, but will definitely offer readers some perks. For instance, Green Lantern fans will likely enjoy seeing popular character John Stewart helping to train Tai. The Phams even have a cat named Jordan, probably a shout-out to another well-known Lantern, Hal Jordan.
The art of Green Lantern: Legacy is bright, clear, and expressive. The characters are easy to tell apart, and the action scenes are easy to read visually. Colorist Sarah Stern uses a vibrant and varied color palette, and she excels at portraying all the glowing green energy and alien architecture that come up so often in a Green Lantern comic.
This is a rich, refreshing addition to DC’s new spate of graphic novels for kids and teens. (The end material of this book includes a sneak peek at another such book, Batman: Overdrive.) Hand it to fans of Super Sons and other kid-friendly superhero comics.
Green Lantern: Legacy By Minh Lê Art by Andie Tong ISBN: 9781401283551 DC Kids, 2020
Browse for more like this title NFNT Age Recommendation: Middle Grade (7-11), Tween (10-13) Character Traits: Vietnamese American Creator Highlights: Own Voices, BIPOC Creator
In her book Why Comics? Hillary Chute states flatly that the foundation of comics is in disaster—Spiegelman’s Holocaust, Jimmy Corrigan’s family, the destruction of Krypton. In Thi Bui’s graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, disaster is foundational and unavoidable as well, but is also intensely personal. We can see that what the world sees as Disaster and History, individual families see as Life. An important addition to the graphic memoir genre, this book tells its story of birth, war, trauma, alienation, and love entirely in personal terms. It grounds the overwhelming in the relatable, making what could be an alien story universal, and salvaging a dark history with the insights that only close family can provide.
The Best We Could Do is a family memoir, describing how writer/artist Bui’s family came to the United States soon after the end of the Vietnam War. In the manner of Spiegelman’s Maus, this book tells Bui’s parents’ stories and intermingles their traumatic histories with Bui’s and her sisters’ life in America. Unlike Maus, this is not a sardonic and self-effacing graphic memoir. It is instead poetic, slow-moving, nuanced, and compassionate. There’s a sadness throughout, the kind of sorrow that comes from recognizing parents as human beings, and from hearing stories that we know we cannot fully understand.
Bui’s father, for example, starts out as an unsympathetic character—he could easily be dismissed as a man who accidentally terrorized his children and emotionally abandoned his wife. However, Bui understands her father as she explores his story, what he has survived and the damage it’s done to his thoughts and emotions. As Bui’s sympathy for and understanding of the man who raised her increases, so does our own. He is a man who faced betrayal throughout his childhood, had unlikely good fortune, but was surrounded by instability—his father was a con artist, his mother born into wealth. He got into politics and found himself on the losing side of a war, saw his mother thrown into the street to starve, and learned that his father—who thrived in the new Communist regime—would not stick his neck out to save his son or grandchild. After the crisis had passed, the traumas remained. By his own admission, even as an old man, Bui’s father will always be something of a wounded child. It’s a painful truth, one that allows Bui’s father to start to forgive himself for his shortcomings as a husband and father, and allows Bui to do the same.
Bui’s mother’s story unfolds with similar complexity and richness—a brilliant student, she attended a French language school and found her voice on the right side of history but the wrong side of political reality. Her life was changed by pregnancy and by war, and by the dissolution of the aristocratic reality she grew up in and learned to despise even as she relied on it. A quiet fighter, Bui’s mother has our sympathy from the start; it’s respect we gain for her rather than affection. Her own experiences left her afraid, unable to stay through her granddaughter’s delivery as it forces her to recall her own pregnancies, a child lost, a fear that lingers through the rest of her life.
2017 was a big year for Bui; she won the Caldecott Medal for her children’s book, A Different Pond, and released The Best We Could Do to critical acclaim. At 42 this is her first graphic novel, and like some other great graphic works—Charles Burns’ Black Hole, Spiegelman’s Maus—it has taken her more than a decade to complete, and the results are as polished as you might hope. Bui favors gorgeous inks, reminiscent of Chinese ink painting. Her characters are a blend of cartoonish realism, capable of creating the impression of an emotionally complex person—the joy in children’s faces, their parents’ haunted eyes—in just a few lines.
Furthermore, these cartoons are recognizable as portraits of real people, matched to photographs within the book. The book is colored only with shaded oranges and blues, giving the entire work the feel of a sepia-toned photo album, most of its details realistic with a few outrageous features, like a framed picture of a human skull resting behind barbed wire adorning a suburban home’s wall. This all comes together as a cohesive whole, beautiful and fragile and sad. Bui conveys a family’s journey that was heroic and imperfect, truly the best they could do. A personal but universal story, well told and brilliantly illuminated. If it has any shortcomings, it’s only in its relatively sparse use of humor, even for a genre not known for jokes. Even so, this book is an extraordinary accomplishment and is essential reading for fans of literary comics.
The Best We Could Do is appropriate for high school, public, and academic library collections. There is some nudity and implied violence that will probably keep it out of younger school libraries. Its blending of literary and artistic achievement with the history of Vietnam—poorly understood in the U.S. despite its importance to our own recent history—marks this as a major work of personal nonfiction, and Bui’s accomplishments as an artist and storyteller distinguish her as a major talent. Also, as a story about refugees, this graphic adds a badly needed human perspective to an often impersonal—and growing—international crisis that U.S. policy has placed itself at the center of. If you are thinking about adding this book to your collection, your timing couldn’t be better.
The Best We Could Do By Thi Bui ISBN: 9781419718786 Harry N. Abrams, 2017 Publisher Age Rating: (16+)
Browse for more like this title Character Traits: Vietnamese, Creator Highlights: Own Voices, BIPOC Creator
Random House Graphix in October 2025, pulls a deep, comforting, swoon-like sigh from the reader, at least this reader. This is a cup of cocoa of a graphic novel. A warm, joint popping hug of a graphic novel. A fully broken-in hoodie of a graphic novel. It’s the best kind of sweet, romantic, comfort read.
Tai Pham isn’t looking for trouble. He’s just living his life: helping in his beloved grandmother’s store, filling sketchbooks with drawings, and hanging out with his best friends. But sometimes, trouble finds him anyway, like when vandals target the store with thrown bricks and racist graffiti. Or when his grandmother passes away, and her jade ring starts following Tai around. It seems he’s been chosen to take over her role as a Green Lantern. But how can Tai become a member of a superpowered intergalactic peacekeeping force? He’s only thirteen!
In her book Why Comics? Hillary Chute states flatly that the foundation of comics is in disaster—Spiegelman’s Holocaust, Jimmy Corrigan’s family, the destruction of Krypton. In Thi Bui’s graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, disaster is foundational and unavoidable as well, but is also intensely personal. We can see that what the world sees as Disaster and History, individual families see as Life. An important addition to the graphic memoir genre, this book tells its story of birth, war, trauma, alienation, and love entirely in personal terms. It grounds the overwhelming in the relatable, making what could be an alien story universal, and salvaging a dark history with the insights that only close family can provide.
