![\"prime-baby-sample.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/prime-baby-sample.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I became a fan of Gene Luen Yang<\/a> after reading his National Book Award-nominated graphic novel, American Born Chinese<\/i>, back in 2006, so I was thrilled to see his latest, Prime Baby<\/i><\/a>, turn up in my mailbox last week. Actually, “latest” is a bit misleading—this serial strip originally ran in The New York Times Magazine<\/i> in 2008 and 2009, although I understand it’s been modified somewhat in the collecting. In any event, it has everything I love about Yang’s storytelling: the depiction of a child’s perspective on the world without condescension or excess sentimentality, a clarity and economy of line that can still bear complex emotional characters, and deadpan delivery of the absurd.<\/p>\n I actually had not followed this strip in the Times<\/i>, as I’m not a particularly close follower of the magazine, so my experience of the story was fresh—and I’ll confess, what I thought at first was going to be a goofy but realistic take on sibling resentment took a genuinely wacky turn about 1\/3 of the way through, and stays wacky but still manages to stay grounded emotionally. And it’s pretty much suitable for any reader from 8 to 80—if you buy it for a child you know, don’t be embarrassed to give it a reading before you hand it over!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I became a fan of Gene Luen Yang after reading his National Book Award-nominated graphic novel, American Born Chinese, back in 2006, so I was thrilled to see his latest, Prime Baby, turn up in my mailbox last week. Actually, “latest” is a bit misleading—this serial strip originally ran in The New York Times Magazine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}