The Magic Fish is a heartwarming graphic novel that showcases beautiful parallels between the fairytales Tien reads with his parents and Tien’s own story of trying to tell his family that he’s gay. There’s a lot of difficulties in communicating with parents that don’t speak English well, and wanting to them something so important as being gay. As this young boy navigates through his own struggling Vietnamese, this book shows us that happiness can be reached even through the language barrier.
The amazing structure and connection these fairytales depicted just showed that communication sometimes exceeds the use of words, and I thought that was an absolutely beautiful concept to add in. Also, as someone who enjoys classic tales a lot, I adored the use of them within this story and how it was so seamlessly linked together.