James Sturm's America

Grades 9-12 Graphic novelist James Sturm takes us through an outsider's journey in American history in James Sturm's America: God, Gold, and Golems.  This history is told in three main sections, the first a family making a wagon-covered journey to a Christian revivalist meeting during the Second Great Awakening, the second follows a rag tag group of miners in a squalid mining camp wrought with violence, and finally, we find a (mostly) Jewish minor-league baseball team eking out a living by heightening their strangeness to rural America.  Though at times requiring a mature reader with background knowledge, this history is wonderful in that it tells lesser-known narratives in a compassionate and reader-friendly way.  The reader can sympathize with a family torn apart by the migratory forces in America, Chinese American miners denied their basic rights, and Jewish Americans (far away, for once, from the legacy of the Holocaust) encountering small American towns with myths as thick as German hamlets.  The illustrations and shading are gripping, and text clear and easy to read.  Done entirely in black and white inking, Sturm beautifully captures raw emotion with his figures, as well as depicting historical scenes and characters in an attractive, though sometimes haunting, and engaging way.  This is a history of outsiders, and a great addition to a graphic novel collection.  Recommended ****