Book Posts - A Map to the Sun
Cathy G. Johnson
Cathy G.'s Book Posts
Book recommendations for young readers, educators + caregivers!
A Map to the Sun, by Sloane Leong, 368 pages, First Second, 2020
Intro: An electric and reverent slice-of-life sports story about female adolescence, A Map to the Sun is a powerful graphic novel for older teens. Ren, Luna, Jetta, Anella and So-young are fiercely independent teenagers living in a beautiful beachside town. Difficulties young adults face such as drug + alcohol use, sexual harassment and self-harm influence the girls’ lives. Together they decide to build something new just for themselves at school: a basketball team.
Theme 1: Growing Up. This book showcases a diversity of challenges young people can face while growing up. Strained relationships with relatives, difficulties in romance, and substance abuse loom large in the lives of Ren, Luna, Jetta, Anella and So-young. These scenarios, like life, don’t offer right or wrong solutions. The girls seek independent spaces for themselves in bedrooms, video games, malls and outdoor activities, and their new addition, a basketball team.
Theme 2: Basketball. A well-meaning female teacher decides to start a new girls’ basketball team at school. The sport reluctantly ties the girls together, and their relationships with each other build and deepen. Basketball offers a space for healthy competition, teamwork, and physicality. Basketball begins as an outlet for the girls to let out frustrations, but slowly allows the girls to grow and excel in ways they haven’t found before.
Theme 3: Friendship. At the center of A Map to the Sun is the relationships of the girls on the basketball team. Ren and Luna have a history of friendship, but when Luna moves back, Ren is hurt and frustrated. Anella finds validation on the team in ways her family doesn’t give her. Their friendships aren’t perfect, and they accidentally hurt each other throughout the story, but the team has each other’s backs when it counts.
Should I Read It?: Strongly recommended for older teens, high school classrooms + libraries! A wonderful addition to any graphic novel collection, this comic is beautiful, fresh, vibrant and full of life.
