Zhou Rucheng is an eighth-grade student with a passion for drawing and few, trusted friends. The last year of middle school is psychologically intense, in China, because final exams determine the quality of high school one will be able to enter. A first step into adult life that can have fundamental consequences, for a person. Add to that the first beatings, the bullying of an older bully who humiliates boys and the feeling, which never leaves Zhou Rucheng, that he is destined for nothing good because he is not good enough even at the thing he loves most. Golo Zhao, one of the foremost exponents of the contemporary Chinese graphic novel, creates a coming-of-age novel with clear autobiographical echoes, one that makes you root for its little protagonist and gives such precise emotional descriptions that it seems to fish in the adolescent experience of those reading the story. A long book, but one that you will wish would never end.

(Source: Bao Publishing, translated)

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• Golo — Story & Art