Here's another good book from 2025 that I just got around to reading. I bought it from the author, Jose Pimienta, at the Latino Comics Expo in Long Beach on December 7, 2025.

What's more, while Halfway to Somewhere is formally traditional, it is also dynamic and ingenious. Pimienta paces the action mainly through offset grids, rhetorically adjusting the layouts to context, with occasional widescreen or unbordered panels to show meaningful action or immersion in environment. He uses nine-panel grids sparingly, sometimes with split panels, to evoke haste, impatience, or process. The book begins with a lovely wordless sequence depicting a desert hike (to La Casa de Piedra, in La Rumorosa) fondly remembered by Ave as a bonding time for their family. Memories of that hike, and Ave's gradual realization that each member of their family remembers it differently, punctuate the story. At times, Pimienta simply puts past (the family hike) and present (Ave's struggle to adjust) side by side, so that readers have to negotiate uncued transitions. In this way, Pimienta trusts his readers to do interpretive work. 

In all, Halfway to Somewhere ​is an artful, disarmingly sophisticated novel. Its conclusion, affirming  yet ambiguous, refuses easy answers but lets us know that Ave will thrive. Pimienta shows that different family members may adjust to cultural displacement differently -- for example, siblings may have divergent attitudes toward assimilation -- and that's okay. Above all, his awareness of language as both social divider and bridge brings a sensitivity that sets the book apart. While Halfway to Somewhere clearly has didactic elements, it's not preachy and it's not pat. I dig.

Another good book from 2025 that I've read just now, in 2026:

How to Say Goodbye in Cuban, a middle-grade GN set during the Cuban Revolution, is not a memoir but a fictionalized biography of the author Daniel Miyares' father, Carlos, or at least a character based on his father. In the back matter, Miyares acknowledges that he "aged [Carlos] up a few years" to better "connect" with the book's target audience; I take it that a middle-grade coming-of-age story was the goal. It seems obvious that the story entailed a lot of imaginative projection and fictive patterning as well as serious research. Carlos is the first-person narrator, and in effect a mouthpiece character explaining the Cuban Revolution to young readers. This is a challenge, because Carlos doesn't really know what's going on. Essentially, the novel treats the Cuban Revolution as a family story interrupted, and partly dictated, by obscure outside forces. These forces, and how his parents respond to them, frustrate Carlos, and anger him. 

Historical exposition of this kind is a heavy lift for a concise middle-grade book, but Miyares meets the challenge ably. While leaning into familiar tropes of children's historical fiction (children overhearing or spying on adults and questioning them; adults trying to protect children from knowing), Miyares also provides interchapter pages that, very briefly, give the larger political context from a perspective beyond that of Carlos. These pages consist of just one image and one or a few sentences each. They punctuate the narrative. Miyares mostly lets things unfold from Carlos' viewpoint without added explanation, while also showing how partial and uncertain Carlos' narration is. In fact, Carlos gets frustrated when patronizing elders try to shield him from political news (a major plot point). The novel's messages are mixed: Carlos would like to know what is going on, and clearly deserves to know more, but on the occasions when he does learn what adults have been keeping from him, he is overwhelmed. In this way, Miyares stresses both children's need for honest communication and their vulnerability. ​

In the back matter, Miyares acknowledges that this book project began some twenty years ago with a sudden outpouring of stories by his father Carlos. At the time, he notes, the two of them "weren't close," yet the project became a way for them to "make up for lost time." Interestingly, much of the book's suspense stems from Carlos' fraught relationship with his own stern father, Papi, a man driven, first, by dreams of success, and then by the desperate need to get his family out of Cuba. Carlos' unhappy displacement from his idyllic rural hometown, caused by his father's ambitions, and his anger toward his father's remote and controlling ways, fuel the story, even as Miyares sketches in looming political dangers. The book's anticommunist (but not reactionary) thrust could compare with that of the 2011 graphic novel Cuba: My Revolution; its depiction of popular revolution turning into statist oppression might seem familiar to readers of, say, Persepolis, The Best We Could Do, or Feeding Ghosts. But the father-son dynamic defines the novel as, first and foremost, an intimate coming-of-age story happening against a political backdrop. The resolution of that dynamic feels a bit fated and oversimple, I think: a quick reconciliation just when things seem most difficult. This comes just before the book's final act, in which Papi has to do some truly dangerous and violent things to ensure the family's passage out of Cuba. Had the father-son reconciliation not happened first, the book's climax might have left a frightening or ambiguous impression of the father. Creative license and a shaping hand are evident in these moves. 

Miyares is an experienced children's author and picture book illustrator, one who seems to have an earned sense of that market and its genre expectations. How to Say Goodbye in Cuban is a children's graphic novel, not coincidentally or as a matter of marketing only, but because Miyares has a firm commitment to creating for child readers. I see that both in the book's sensitivity and in its silences and feints. I also see Miyares' picture-book craft in the drawings, which are rendered in old-school, predigital ink and watercolor (though lettered in a custom digital font based on Miyares' handwriting). The style is less cartoony than illustrative, marked by extensive hatching (delicate penwork) and evocative washes of color. I enjoy seeing the grain, the earned texture, of the drawings. Sometimes, especially when conjuring place, the pages are very immersive. On the other hand, sometimes the scene-setting is loose and gestural. Miyares avoids overcrowding and has a good sense of when to let the page breathe out. If his depictions of sudden action or movement are sometimes a bit stilted, or his compromises between naturalism and stylization a bit tentative, still, the book is a feast of textures and Carlos and his family remain vivid and recognizable throughout.

On balance, How to Say Goodbye in Cuban is an ambitious and assured, but still vulnerable, open-hearted, and deeply personal work. It wears its didacticism lightly, and at times seems genuinely heartsore and challenging, though its ending is affirming enough. This historical fiction could be a revelation for many young readers, as its depiction of the Cuban Revolution is not one-sided or flat.  It's worth reading for comics lovers, period.

Ngozi Ukazu's Flip, a YA graphic novel set at a tony prep school, offers a body-swapping story and a complex lesson in empathy. Its plot hook is simple and perhaps obvious, but what Ukazu does with it is anything but. The book is smart, complex, surprising, and, finally, moving: a wonderful novel.

Briefly, Flip follows Chi-Chi, a shy, socially withdrawn Nigerian American Blerd from an impoverished family, and her crush Flip, a popular white jock from a super-wealthy family, as they trade places and learn how to navigate the world as each other. After Chi-Chi invites Flip to the senior prom and he publicly turns her down, her shame precipitates a psychic crisis that somehow triggers their body-swapping, which leads to complicated and embarrassing maneuvers as the two try to play each other's social roles. The body-swapping isn't constant, but comes and goes. Ukazu never explains the mechanisms of this; the body-swapping has no pseudoscientific or magical root cause. But there are rules, of a sort, one of which is that each period of body-swapping seems to last twice as long as before. Chi-Chi and Flip are terrified that the swapping may eventually become permanent. The two develop a deeper understanding of each other, not only because of the body-swapping but because they have to work together. Chi-Chi experiences Flip's crumbling family and deep depression; Flip experiences Chi-Chi's self-hatred and unquenchable longing to be someone else. For both, self-love requires looking at the world through the other's eyes.  

This may sound obvious, even platitudinous, but Ukazu avoids crude signposting. She lets every character develop complexly, not according to received generalizations about privilege or race but out of their own circumstances. Necessary points about Blackness and whiteness, about social ostracism, structural disadvantage, and envy, become earned insights as Ukazu pits the two characters against each other. Provocatively, there are many moments in the book at which the actual identity of the characters (who is speaking, from what POV?) becomes indistinct or ambiguous. As Chi-Chi and Flip begin to identify with one another, Ukazu pushes the story further and further, into fascinating tangles. The conclusion, which redefines the two leads, is affecting and tonally complex: affirming, yes, but surprising almost to the very end.  

Ukazu's brilliant writing and delightful, elastic cartooning are, above all, socially astute: alive to the interworking of personalities and groups, to social complications, to hierarchies and compensatory habits. Each named character, not just Chi-Chi and Flip, navigates the world differently, and grows more distinct and interesting as the story progresses. There's a remarkable scene in which Flip's ex, a conventionally beautiful alpha girl, asks him to the prom, only to be rejected by Chi-Chi, in Flip's body, who is spurred on by jealousy. There's a great scene in which Chi-Chi, in Flip's body, braids Chi-Chi's, or for the moment Flip's, hair. This is somehow both tense and encouraging. And then there's the stunning scene in which Flip, in Chi-Chi's body, confronts Chi-Chi about her own self-loathing. Complexities like these, delightful and confounding, mark the novel from start to finish.

In short, this is a great book! Ukazu's character-writing is remarkably sensitive, her pages lively and dynamic, and her use of visual metaphors tricky and smart. Flip is the kind of book that certain readers will embrace devotedly, and it's likely to be remembered as a watershed. It's that good.