Nguyen’s art is drawn in a style that seems a wonderful compromise between Golden Age illustration of the sort one might find in Andrew Lang’s fairy books or collections of Brothers Grimm or Andersen fairy tales and modern, realistic manga. The other stories are a Vietnamese version of Cinderella and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” the latter of which is presented here as a story of a frowned-upon relationship (“My sweet child, this is transgressive,” the sea witch tells the little mermaid when she learns of her love for a mortal), albeit one whose ending is rather radically changed in a twist resolution to Tiến’s anxiety regarding coming out.
“Tattercoats,” a Cinderella variant that thus prominently features the attendance of a series of balls…which unfolds around scenes of Helen sewing patches on Tiến’s coat, and of he and his friends preparing for a school dance. For example, the first story they read is The three fairy tales they read reflect their conflicts in various and, admittedly, sometimes pat ways.
Tiến, meanwhile, has a crush on the boy in his little circle of friends at a private Christian school, and he struggles with if or how to come out to his parents, as he doesn’t even know if there is a word for “gay” in Vietnamese.
In the present, Helen feel a bit lost, as she struggles with feeling separated from her own ailing mother in Vietnam and works hard to earn enough money to return to visit her without sacrificing any element of the life she helped build for Tiến. The present is in red, the past in yellow and the fairy tales in purple, with a few exceptions, as when one setting overlaps with another, or something needs special accentuation within an established setting (the peaches or blood in a fairy tale, for example). Nguyen’s story takes place in three different times and spaces, and though the art is essentially black and white, each of these settings is represented by a different color, which sometimes fills in what would otherwise be empty backgrounds with solid planes of color and takes the place of shades of gray. It proves an intimate and incredibly effective way to connect reader and character. In The Magic Fish, Trung Le Nguyen’s extraordinary debut graphic novel, the artist dramatizes the fairy tales that Helen and Tiến read within the narrative, so that readers also participate in their shared experiences.
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