Names and Faces: A Graphic Memoir

by Leise Hook

A graphic memoir-in-essays examining the in-betweenness of being mixed-race and the cultural confrontations inherent to forging one’s identity

Who are you? What are you? And how does it feel to be you? Leise Hook was asked these intrusive questions so many times growing up that they haunted her like ghosts. Born to a Chinese mother and white American father, and growing up in Michigan, Tokyo, and Virginia, Leise Hook was never sure where she fit in. More white-passing than her Chinese friends and family, but with the Mandarin skills of a native speaker, she was constantly exceeding some expectations while failing to meet others. From moving to Beijing, to dying her hair blonde, to exploring self portraiture, Hook struggles to figure out who she is and where she belongs.

In the vein of Cathy Park Hong and Gene Luen Yang, Hook’s graphic memoir-in-essays rendered via her signature, award-winning style, explores what it means to come of age as a mixed-race woman, forging a singular identity in a world intent on putting her into ill-fitting boxes.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Nonfiction, Graphic Novels Comics, Comics, Memoir

256 pages, Hardcover

First published April 14, 2026

Reviews

[Elizabeth A · Rating 3 out of 5]

A graphic memoir told in essay format. The author unpacks identify, belonging, and figuring out her place in in the world as a bi-racial woman. Given the themes explored I should have loved this but was left oddly unmoved by the academic tone of this one. I would 100% read a memoir about her parents.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leise has a Chinese mother and a white father. She grows up speaking both Manaderin and English. She thinks that is normal, until she goes to school, and everyone wants to know “what” she is. Because she doesn’t look white, exactly, nor does she look Chinese.

She writes about hoping that one day she would find a place where she could be herself. She thought going to China would do it, but of course, it does not.

Growing up, she desperately wanted an American Girl doll that looked like her, but there wasn’t one. She finally settled for Josefina, because she came the closest.

Her grandmother grew up during the Japanese occupation of China. She had managed to suppress most of that, but sometimes, at night, she could be heard screaming.

There are many pieces to her story, and she tries to find what it is that makes her whole. I’m not sure if there is one answer to that, which is probably why this book doesn’t try to actually have a full answer to that question.

Interesting to see this perspective. Nicely drawn.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review. This book is comingout the on the 14th of April 2026.

[Mara K. · Rating 2 out of 5]

two and a half stars.
while i liked the idea of showing that everyone is different, i personally found it rather wordy, and just like a stream on facts most of the time. i had a lot of trouble finishing it. i was expecting it to be more of a story, so maybe if i had come into it thinking thats not what it was going to be, i would have enjoyed it more. that said, some parts, the parts that were like tiny parts of her life, were good and i liked them. i also liked the rare bits that were in full color, which made it really pop.

thanks to netgalley and the publisher for letting me read it in advance!

[sea ʚ♡ɞ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to Henry Holt & Co. for the Advanced Reader's Copy. This review is voluntary and my honest opinion ♡

This graphic novel is a great depiction of what it is like to be different from the norm and to embrace the complexities of race and identity.

We start with "Names," where the author introduces us to her with the powerful impact of names and how her identity is tied with both her Chinese name and her English name. As someone with only one name, it was pretty eye-opening to me to realize that some people feel this split between their names and a struggle to reconcile between the names. As someone who values the intricacies of language, it is interesting how overlooked a name can be and yet it is something that defines us on a daily. I felt educated and also moved by this first chapter. We also start to see where the author is trying to find her space in the world, a recurring theme in this story.

We follow with many more powerful stories. "Faces" depicts the experience of biracial people as other's try to uncover the mystery of their faces. As someone who has often heard the question "What are you?" this chapter made me feel deeply seen while also showing me so much more of the author through her childhood and seek to find others who understood her experience. In "The Vine and the Fish" we learn about the dangerous language around invasive species and how it is damaging to us as a society. This, also, taught me a lot and reframed how my mind thinks of these species. In "Just Like Me" we learn about American Girl Dolls and the struggle as a biracial person to find adequate representation in the world that makes you feel seen. And those are just the first 4 stories! There are more amazing stories that both taught me something new and connected me deeply with the author.

The art feels gentle with it's soft color scheme and clean lines that have so much personality. I'm not an artist or very knowledgeable about art so I am not sure how to describe it best but I felt that it fit the story really well.

This book is easy to read but powerful in it's nature. I would highly recommend it and I am so thankful for the ARC as I really loved this one!

[kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leise is half Chinese and half German, but she has trouble identifying herself. She’s American, but she’s doesn’t fit in as Asian and she doesn’t fit in as Caucasian. She has an Asian name and an American name and has trouble figuring out her identity. This book takes you through her self discovery of fitting in and finding where she belongs.

I loved that Leise was very honest with her doubts and confusion as to who she really is as a person living in America. I also loved that she is so close to her Asian roots. Her adventures to discover who is she is very interesting as not everything is black and white and she is a grey color trying to figure things out.

Being 100% Asian, I found this book very interesting when it talks about America Dream Dolls and hair. I had an American Dream doll (Kiersten) and didn’t really think twice about the race of the doll. I believe it is because I was more into their clothes as I really identified myself as someone who likes to create. This book talks about the author’s hair and how it’s not your classic black sleek hair and I thought this was interesting because my hair is a dark brown (definitely not black) and it does this weird weak wavy thing. I think there are many different ways to self identify yourself. I can totally understand Leise’s struggle with finding the right crowd and her path to finding who she is.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

What the Mirror Cannot Settle
In “Names and Faces,” Leise Hook turns names, portraits, and family memory into a meditation on the instability of being seen
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 27th, 2026

A mixed-race memoir is often handed a clerical task. Explain yourself. Settle the riddle. File the categories away before anyone in the room grows uneasy. “Names and Faces” refuses the paperwork. Leise Hook’s graphic memoir is interested less in answering “What are you?” than in examining the coarse instruments by which the question gets put to her. A name, a face, a doll, a hairstyle, a photograph, a portrait – each promises recognition on sight. Each arrives with distortions already packed into the box.

That shift matters because Hook is not finally writing a book about identity as a stable fact waiting to be declared. She is writing about the devices the culture deputizes to make a self sortable on sight. She is, plainly, writing about mixed-race identity: the daughter of a Chinese mother and a white American father, raised across Michigan, Tokyo, and Virginia before later living in Beijing and New York. But “Names and Faces” is stranger, sharper, and more exacting than that summary suggests. It keeps returning to things that are supposed to settle the matter – names, faces, language, merchandise, photographs, paintings – and asking what they reveal, what they miss, and what they quietly demand in exchange.

Hook organizes the book as a row of essay-chambers: “Names,” “Faces,” “The Vine and the Fish,” “Just Like Me,” “Yellow Hair,” “Long Exposure,” “In Beijing,” “Fluency,” and “The Portrait.” The table of contents looks neat; the book itself keeps muddying its own borders. A question about naming becomes a question about translation. A question about dolls turns into a question about history. A question about photography turns into a question about grief, then into a question about whether likeness is ever anything more than a carefully preserved misunderstanding. This modular structure is one of the book’s great advantages. It allows Hook to circle the same wound from multiple angles without pretending there is one master key that will tidy it away.

“Names” opens with the double naming at the center of Hook’s life: Leise in one context, Lidun in another. The material could have yielded a familiar bicultural anecdote. Hook gives it more bite than that. Names here carry family ambition, linguistic drift, misremembering, and the hope that syntax might serve as armor. Her mother chooses a Chinese name whose sounds and characters suggest strength and sincerity. Her father misremembers the spelling of the German name he means to pass on. The mistake is tiny, absurd, and permanent. That scale matters. Hook is very good at noticing how the smallest errors become lifelong weather. What follows is less a march toward synthesis than a series of attempts to draw a self without sanding away the seam lines.

“Faces” tightens the pressure by moving from names, which can at least be spelled, to surfaces strangers think they can solve in an instant. To ask “What are you?” is to assume a face is a riddle with one correct answer and that the person wearing it should be ready to produce it on demand. Hook is excellent on the insult tucked inside the supposed curiosity. The question does not merely request information. It deputizes the face. Childhood in Ann Arbor becomes a life parceled into halves. Tokyo, by contrast, offers a brief reprieve: an international school where mixed children and other third-culture kids are common enough that Hook becomes, in her wonderful phrase, “blissfully unremarkable.” The joke is how little she asks for: not transcendence, not revelation, just a day without being interpreted. Yet even this reprieve arrives with a script already waiting in the wings. Mixed-race children are told they are bridges, portable social harmony, a brochure for the coming century. Hook is too alert to swallow that flattery whole. A bridge is still infrastructure. Other people are already planning their route.

That refusal of easy uplift gives the memoir much of its authority. Hook does not cast herself as either mascot or martyr. She keeps turning the knife of analysis back toward her own wishes, vanities, and bad ideas. “Yellow Hair,” one of the book’s strongest sections, understands that blondness is never just about hair. It is glamour, hierarchy, childhood shimmer, the beauty economy, fantasy of self-editing, and occasionally an expensive mistake undertaken under flattering light. Hook moves from Barbie and fairy-tale gold to salon balayage, family response, and the eerie realization that lightening her hair makes her face look, to her own eyes, “more Chinese.” It is a superb sentence because it catches the chapter’s logic in miniature: a gesture meant to tilt the self in one direction pulls the face, perversely, in another. Lesser books would make blondness stand neatly for whiteness, rebellion, self-erasure, or self-expression. Hook lets the symbolism stay jammed. Desire, she knows, rarely arrives as a clean manifesto. It arrives as a mood board with nerves.

“Just Like Me,” the American Girl chapter, is just as sharp and perhaps more devastating. Hook is interested in what a look-alike doll can and cannot do. A doll offers resemblance. It may even offer the thrill of being noticed by the market. But resemblance is thin stuff without history attached. Hook traces the brand’s white historical dolls, its late additions, its customizable line, and the odd vacancy of self-identification sold as a product feature. A doll can have your eyes, your skin tone, even a face mold built to signal “Asian,” and still remain hollow if the world around it withholds the deeper thing Hook wanted as a child: evidence that her story had meaning, context, weight. The point lands softly and leaves a bruise. A store-bought likeness is not the same thing as belonging. Commerce is delighted to offer the first and send the invoice.

That chapter is especially good at showing what this memoir understands better than many books about representation. The problem is not simply absence. Absence matters, of course. But presence can also be cheap. The market can always hand you a customized shell and call it recognition. Hook wants something harder and less easily merchandised: narrative, inheritance, historical placement, a form of acknowledgment that does not stop at resemblance. She is interested in the difference between being pictured and being located. That distinction gives the chapter its force.

“The Vine and the Fish” is the book’s most exposed wager. Hook runs her experience through the language of invasion biology: kudzu, Asian lady beetles, so-called Asian carp. The analogy could have hardened into slogan; Hook keeps it alive by refusing to make it comfortable. She does not pretend species management is merely a disguised racial drama or that ecological harm is imaginary. What she notices, instead, is how quickly the language of “alien” and “invasive” begins flattering human fantasies of purity and defense. Her identification with “a beetle, a vine, and a fish” is uneasy, even faintly embarrassing. Good. A less alert writer would turn the analogy into a banner and march around with it. Hook leaves it where it belongs – as a live irritant. The chapter’s power lies not in claiming equivalence but in exposing contamination at the level of metaphor. Categories are rarely as clean as their users imagine.

If the book has a center of gravity, it lies in images rather than labels. “Long Exposure,” the chapter on Hook’s grandmother Laolao, is where the memoir cuts deepest. Laolao is funny, exacting, stylish, short-tempered, camera-happy, and finally dying in a borrowed hospital bed while the household around her keeps clattering with chores, meals, seedlings, and dread. Hook spends hours with albums and prints, trying to understand a woman shaped by war, flight, hunger, family myth, and the camera’s little vanity. The chapter’s truth is blunt enough to sting: photographs keep the dead visible without making them legible. They preserve outfits, meals, faces, postures, gardens. They do not out-argue history. Hook understands both the seduction of the archive and its refusal. What remains are photos, stories, handwriting, a few repeated gestures, and an ache sharpened by the fact that evidence is not access.

This is where the graphic form does some of its most exacting work. Hook is not using drawings simply to illustrate memory. She is using them to register the gap between record and recovery. The memoir understands that an image can preserve a surface with perfect fidelity while still failing to yield a life. That is one of the book’s central insights and one of the reasons it feels larger than its summary. Again and again Hook takes some supposedly clarifying form – a name, a doll, a photograph, a mirror – and demonstrates that what it offers is never the whole of what it appears to promise.

The Beijing chapter widens that ache into humiliation. Hook moves to China expecting, if not revelation, then at least a cleaner route to belonging. She has the language, the family history, the aesthetic ambition, and the earnest belief that she is heading toward her “origin story.” Beijing hands her a far less flattering script. She works at a photography museum and then a gallery, struggles to perform competence, gets renamed “Lisha” by bosses who find her actual Chinese name too troublesome, absorbs the judgments of a mostly white expat social world, and discovers that proximity to origin does not produce home. It produces another estrangement altogether. She is useful, exotic, bilingual, appealing to collectors, not quite enough of anything, and slowly coming apart at the seams.

What makes this section so good is Hook’s refusal to rescue her younger self with retrospective poise. She lets the fantasy look vain, hungry, and young. She wanted Beijing to confirm a self she had already drafted. Instead it exposed the draft. Place, in this chapter, becomes another failed machine for self-correction. It cannot solve what she hoped it would solve. The city does not hand her a deeper authenticity. It gives her one more setting in which the categories fail and the performance buckles. That is a hard thing for a memoirist to admit, and Hook earns a great deal of trust by admitting it.

“Fluency” lowers the book’s volume and tightens its grip. From the outside, Hook has enviable linguistic abundance: Mandarin first, English after, then more languages and literatures beyond. From inside, fluency feels less like abundance than like blockage. Praise for her Chinese can feel both gratifying and diminishing. English, the language in which she writes, also arrives with shame, class anxiety, and the sense that perfect command belongs to someone else. Hook’s metaphors here are deft. Speaking a language she has not used in too long feels like putting on an old pair of shoes and discovering, halfway out the door, that her feet have forgotten the shape. Words become steps. Phrases return like melodies heard once and only partly recovered. Language is not simply a tool here. It is a stage on which pride, fear, and permission keep changing costumes.

That question of permission brings the book to its best ending. “The Portrait” begins with a childhood oil painting commissioned by Hook’s parents and ends with self-portraiture, mirror reversal, and the unnerving experience of meeting one’s own face without the usual softening tricks. A non-reversing mirror does not provide truth in any triumphant sense. It provides shock. Hook’s face appears pinched, lopsided, “poorly made.” It is a brutal phrase, and exactly the right one, because the chapter is not really about optical accuracy. It is about what self-scrutiny reveals once vanity drops out of the frame. Hook’s answer is not a lesson in self-love. Mercifully, the book has no interest in inspirational signage. She paints. She looks again. She keeps looking. By the end, the self-portrait says something the mirror could not: this face is not blurry, not wrong, not a clerical error in the paperwork of likeness. The turn is subtle but decisive. The book begins by asking how others read a mixed face. It ends by asking whether one can look at one’s own face without joining the prosecution.

Hook writes in the register this project demands: lucid, unshowy, and impatient enough with jargon not to let it colonize the page. In a book moving among memoir, criticism, history, and visual analysis, bad prose would fail in one of two directions: it would either mummify itself in theory or spray lyric perfume over every emotion. Hook does neither. Her sentences are generally short to medium in length, clear, well-governed, and clever enough to avoid dutifulness. She can move from scholarship to family anecdote to a small comic humiliation without leaving seams all over the page. There are moments here that recall the analytic restlessness of “Minor Feelings” by Cathy Park Hong or, in the marriage of visual form and racial sociality, “Good Talk” by Mira Jacob. But Hook is less conversational than Jacob and less polemical than Hong. She is more diagrammatic, more willing to let an object or image carry the load. The limitation of the prose is the inverse of its strength. It clarifies beautifully. It does not always surprise. Now and then a sentence arrives already wearing its good manners.

The prose carries the book well; the design is where it starts doing double duty. Each chapter borrows the visual logic of the thing it is examining: naming systems, specimen arrays, catalog pages, salon surfaces, darkroom shadows, maps, language diagrams, portraits. This is not a memoir with drawings attached out of good behavior. The graphics are part of the argument. Hook uses visual systems to ask what those systems do to a life – how they sort it, flatter it, clip it, blur it, sell it back. It is the book’s most impressive feat. “Names and Faces” turns mixed-race memoir into a study of representation itself. Names, faces, dolls, fish, hair, archives, and mirrors are not side topics. They are the culture’s various attempts to pin a self in place, each with its own paperwork and its own small violences.

The drawback is real: now and then the book seems to spot its own pattern a fraction too soon. The argument about likeness and misrecognition is strong enough to carry the whole memoir, but it occasionally makes one chapter feel like an extension of another rather than a fresh complication. “The Vine and the Fish,” for all its daring, comes closest to straining under the weight of its own analogy. More broadly, the modular structure creates accumulation rather than propulsion. Readers who want scene-by-scene dramatic rise may feel the book tightening its conceptual netting where a messier memoir would have let more static into the line. This is not a fatal weakness. It is the cost of a book whose intelligence is unusually well organized. The filing system is part of the achievement. It is also, once or twice, part of the strain.

For me, “Names and Faces” lands at 90/100, or 5 stars. It earns that rating not by being flawless, but by being distinct. It takes real formal risks, thinks hard about the culture’s appetite for legible selves, and refuses the consolation of easy synthesis. What lingers is not a slogan about identity. It is a harder, more useful insight. A name helps, until it narrows. A doll helps, until it arrives emptied of history. A photograph helps, until it shows how much can be preserved and still not known. A mirror helps, until it demands a kind of honesty for which most of us are poorly dressed. Hook leaves those instruments on the table and lets you see the scratches on each. By the end, likeness looks less like proof than like a difficult practice – not the moment the world finally gets you right, but the moment you stop asking one compliant image to bear the whole burden.

[Elia · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting yet somewhat all over the place at cultural identity, race, and language from the POV of a biracial woman (Chinese/American). Each chapter looks at a different facet of her life and her struggle to come to terms with where she belongs.

[That One Witchy Librarian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley and Henry Holt and Co. for this digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

As a biracial person, I was definitely interested in how other biracial people felt being mixed. Being half Black and White, I have constantly been told that I acted or looked like one race or the other. "You're smart for a Black kid--oh you're half white that explains it. You talk pretty white." or "you sound too white to be one of us (happened in grade school). I understand feeling like you are being pulled in different directions while also feeling like you are in this in between world that no one else seems to understand.

Given that, I will say I didn't quite understand where the author was going and maybe that was the point. I found the parts where she brought up studies and research unnecessary, but maybe it was her way of understanding what exactly she felt. I am unsure. I will say, as a graphic novel I felt like it could read more like a research paper rather than what I would have expected for a graphic novel. Maybe that it would have been better suited as a novel with pictures rather than a graphic novel. But also maybe the messy narrative is what she was intending--a view of her brain and thoughts and complexities straight to paper.

I'm not saying this book wasn't good, it just had moments where I was lost and didn't understand what she was getting at. While others scenes with powerful. For example, her moving to Beijing to better understand her roots and the constant pressure of it all and even maybe feeling like she was losing her Chinese half when her co-workers and boss went from using her Chinese name to her American name.

Overall, it wasn't my cup of tea and that's okay. I definitely think I may have preferred this in a novel form where she could have elaborated and extended her view points. However, I think she did great at being reflective, the art is beautiful, and she gives a good intro to her thoughts.

[Cole · Rating 4 out of 5]

In her graphic novel memoir, Leise Hook explores race and identity as a third-culture kid coming from a white American father and Chinese mother. She spends time in Michigan, Tokyo, Virginia, and Beijing, each with its own challenges and assumptions about her identity. She’s not Chinese or Asian enough for some, not white enough for others. She comes to hate the phrase “how is your [insert English or Mandarin here] so good?”

It’s a beautiful memoir tackling some major topics in race, identity, and belonging, all in the form of a graphic novel that brings these identities to new light. Graphic novels are such an underrated narrative device; and Leise Hook uses it to her advantage to, without caricaturizing, tell a story that could only be told in images. It’s a deeply personal read, with beautiful and evocative illustrations. Readers will get lost (in the best way) in between the imagery, just as the author herself is sometimes lost between identities. You can feel the catharsis seeping through the pages as she fits into panels and boxes her own outside-the-box identities. Highly recommend!

Reviewed as part of an #ARC from the publisher.

Read this book if you:
🗣️ have ever had to explain your name or its spelling
🖼️ love graphic memoirs exploring heavy topics, similar to Genderqueer
🧸 waited decades for an American Girl doll that looked like you

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[Amanda Iman · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful book. It had been a few years since I read a Graphic Memoir and I'm so glad I ran across this one. Within the first two chapters, I knew I'd be messaging my Graphic Narrative professor to recommend this one to her. It took me back to being in that class 10 years ago in the best way.

Hook and I are of a similar age, and I identified with many of her experiences of growing up in the '90s and early 2000s. Her chapters about American Girl dolls and blonde hair particularly resonated with me. And I think that is part of the magic of this memoir. Hook is exploring her identity throughout the book, and while it is her unique experience of being mixed race growing up (largely) in the US, she writes about and illustrates those experiences so vividly that you can't help but relate and empathize with her.

I really liked the scholarly approach Hook uses on and off in the book; citing studies, podcasts, exhibits, etc. It blends beautifully with her personal experiences. I also loved her use of color in her illustrations. She alternates between monotone and vibrant, full color. But even when her panels are monochromatic, the color she chooses to use--blue, green, black, etc.--informs the story she's telling in that essay.

Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt & Company for access to this eARC in exchange for my honest review.

[Shannon (The Book Club Mom) · Rating 4 out of 5]

NAMES AND FACES: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR by Leise Hook drew me in instantly. The author takes her readers on a journey detailing her experience growing up biracial while living in America, Tokyo, and then moving to Beijing for a stint as a new adult.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
𝘐𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘦𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘊𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘺 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘬 𝘏𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘎𝘦𝘯𝘦 𝘓𝘶𝘦𝘯 𝘠𝘢𝘯𝘨, 𝘏𝘰𝘰𝘬’𝘴 𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘩��𝘤 𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘪𝘳-𝘪𝘯-𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘷𝘪𝘢 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦, 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥-𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘵𝘺𝘭𝘦, 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘭𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘵 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘮𝘪𝘹𝘦𝘥-𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘯, 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘳 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘢 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘯 𝘱𝘶𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘪𝘭𝘭-𝘧𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘣𝘰𝘹𝘦𝘴.

Whether it be how others perceive her, or how she perceives herself, Hook struggles to see where she truly fits in with both an American and Chinese background. This internal conflict has most definitely molded and shaped her into the person she is today.

I especially liked the section on American Girl dolls, Hook’s take on their popularity, and what it was like not finding one that looked like her. It provided much insight on the history of the dolls and how the company’s focus and mindset have changed and shifted over the years.

Overall, I found this graphic memoir very insightful and eye-opening as it tackled themes like cultural identity, race, belonging, language, and family while also bringing much awareness of what it’s like growing up biracial.

4/5 stars for NAMES AND FACES! It’s out now!

[Rod Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a series of themed graphic essays, Leise Hook reflects on life as a multiracial person caught in a limbo between her white and Chinese roots.

She has a very thought-provoking perspective to offer, but since it is not a full memoir there are also some frustrating gaps. What is offered is very compelling, and I look forward to seeing what she does next.


Disclosure: I received access to a copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.com.


FOR REFERENCE:

Contents: Introduction -- Names -- Faces -- The Vine and the Fish -- Just Like Me -- Yellow Hair -- Long Exposure -- In Beijing -- Fluency -- The Portrait -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- [About the Author]

Note: An earlier version of "The Vine and the Fish" was published in The Believer, Issue 132: October/November.

[lindsloveslit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley and Henry Holt and Company for the digital ARC!

My recent reading has been dominated by memoirs and essay collections that dig into race, mixed heritage, and the search for belonging. SO, it was natural for me to be drawn to NAMES and FACES by Leise Hook.

Though I am not biracial, as a biracial and transnational adoptee, I fully understand growing up with the constant intrusive question of "who are you?" and "what are you?". Hook wrote an insightful and reflective graphic novel that I was able to devour in one sitting. In it, she shared about her biracial and bicultural identities. She doesn't shy away from the complexities of her belonging, and her words, combined with her drawings, ended up feeling deeply personal.

This is going to be released April 14th, and if you enjoy identity-focused explorations of mixed-race belongings, with moody, essay-like rhythm that blends personal reflection and cultural critique -- then you NEED to pick up this book!

[Natalie Park · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Henry Holt & Company and Net Galley for the Arc in exchange for my honest review. This graphic novel memoir deals with identity and how the world sees her, and more importantly how she sees herself. Born to a Chinese mother and a German father who are both linguists, she has been white passing for most of her life but always got the questions around her identity, what are you? She has both an American and Chinese name, was very close to her Chinese grandmother and spoke Mandarin and has lived in the US, Japan and China. All of this sets her up for so many questions about her identity and how she fits into her world and the larger world. I enjoyed her illustrations as well as the story line and her story provides understanding and empathy for those searching for belonging and identity.

[Frankkie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars rounded up - I really liked the simple but stylistically pleasing art - these comics read like a visual diary of Hook’s most significant moments, with a strong sense for layout and pacing. It feels intimate without being overexplained, like stepping into her mind as she reflects on the struggle of fitting in as a mixed-race woman in the U.S (and abroad). I’m raising a mixed-race child, so I do wonder if they’ll move through similar moments of self-observation. It felt like a window into that - both in real time and in the small, accumulating experiences that shape identity. I could see myself sharing this book with my child when they’re older.

Even without sharing that exact background, a lot of it still felt relatable. There’s something universal in the search for where we come from and how that informs who we are.

I received this book as an eARC.

[Michelle Tuite · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading 2026
Book 101: Names and Faces: A Graphic Memoir by Leise Hook

A friend let me borrow this graphic memoir, written for an adult audience.

Synopsis: A graphic memoir-in-essays examining the in-betweenness of being mixed-race and the cultural confrontations inherent to forging one’s identity

Review: Reading brings me perspective on a variety of topics. With Names and Faces, this memoir offers a peak into the life of the author who is mixed-race. We get a look at all her struggles growing up, and her journey to find where she belongs. This journey includes working in China for a time. So much information was shared, but this reader felt removed from the author instead of feeling invited in. My rating 3.5⭐️.

[USOM · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)

As a transracial adoptee, I've always found that biracial stories have been the closest I've ever gotten to similar feelings. To being stuck between these two identities, between these conflicting feelings of belonging and isolation. Names and Faces is striking memoir with stunning colors and expressive use of panels. I loved the use of space and silence within this graphic novel. It's incredibly poetic and the first essay is one of my favorites about names and identity. It feels approachable, engaging, and relatable. The American Girl Doll essay was like being thrown back in time!

[Anne Shirley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Names and Faces is a quietly powerful book: reflective, artful, and unafraid of complexity. Hook doesn’t offer tidy answers — and that’s precisely why this memoir feels true. It’s a deeply personal map of identity, illustrated with care and introspection, and a reminder that belonging is often more about the journey than the destination.
Hook’s writing is both thoughtful and honest. She skillfully reframed the concept of "invasive species" as a metaphor for xenophobia and cultural purity. Her illustrations are clean and expressive and her layout choices mirror the internal tension of belonging without fitting in.

It was an invigorating read.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Names and Faces is a graphic novel memoir written and illustrated by Leise Hook. It tells the story of her internal conflicts as a biracial American. Her mother is Chinese and her father is a white American. She looks American, but she speaks Mandarin fluently. Would living in China help? She tried that, but the conflicting emotions only intensified. Is she more American and white or more Chinese? Why can't people see both sides of her? I would recommend this book to anyone, but especially those who are bi- and multiracial and also those who were adopted transracially.

Thanks to Henry Holt and Co. and NetGalley for a review copy of Names and Faces.

[Mayra Tepi · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Demolition can be the start of building something new. But it is always the destruction of what stood before."

Oh, I felt seen with this memoir! The author shares her journey of finding identity and a sense of belonging. Being of mixed races and cultures, you end up feeling like you have to prove you are part of each. I loved how the author goes into great detail about every struggle she's faced in each essay.

Being a graphic novel made this such a interesting and bingeable read. The drawings help understand the writing on another level. Honestly, I even enjoyed the color palette!

Thank you henryholtbooks for the gifted copy!

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Read this if: you like graphic memoirs

Skip this if: you prefer some humor in your nonfiction

This was a well-done graphic memoir that focuses primarily on the author’s search for her identity as a biracial woman born in America. The drawings were wonderful and supported the text. I don’t know that it will necessarily stick with me for long, but I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it to those who enjoy graphic memoirs. If you are brand new to the genre, I’d try something by Alison Bechdel or Kristin Radtke first.

Thank you to Henry Holt and Co. for the advanced reader copy!

[Cheryl Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Identity is an onion, and although Hook thinks she's made peace with hers—as the daughter of a white American father and a Chinese mother, both linguists—there are always more layers. Each essay in this collection examines biracial and bicultural identity from a different angle. My favorite is Hook's extended essay on how waging war against "invasive species" contains xenophobic undertones; in reality, we live in a globalized world where few places are untouched by non-natives, and an obsession with purity overlooks the sometimes beautiful complexity of a cross-pollinated landscape.

[Katelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A look at what it means to be biracial. While I feel like there's been an influx of books on this topic, I did appreciate the author's perspective of growing up half-Chinese in the rural US. Rather than being a linear story, the novel was divided into sections that were more like essays on different topics. This made the book feel like it dragged at times, but I did like being able to easily put the book up and down. The artwork was also nice, and I appreciated the use of colors and language to evoke feelings. Overall, a solid graphic novel for anyone interested in the topic!

[Cortney · Rating 4 out of 5]

We tend to feel so alone in our insecurities and, as she writes, it is nice to know you're not alone. Others are feeling and dealing with it too. We're not alone. I went through my own experiences as a child and, as Hook dabbled in curious thoughts about how her child(ren) would look with David, I now have a child who is also mixed. I worry about how she'll see herself in this world and how others will see her. I brought this home with both of us in mind. Hopefully it gives her as much perspective as it has given me.

[D.K Randi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was thrilled to get this book! We love graphic novels in this family and as a parent to a biracial child, this gave me lots of things to think about. So many real issues were touched like the American dolls and that's super important. The 3rd generation, bridge, concept is something I hadn't thought of, but makes a lot of sense. I'm planning to give this to my child when they enter high school, hoping it will help them navigate who they are a little easier. Thank you for writing this!

Also, the graphics and drawings this book had were great! Not to complicated but capturing. The way color and both languages transitions for different points in the story were genius!

[Horace Hudson · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC provided by Netgalley and Henry Holt & Company

This is a graphic memoir that contains musings in several topics in regards to her biracial identity. The art is quite well done, and I enjoy how introspective and insightful it is. It jumps around a bit in time. I always like reading about other mixed race people experience things. She seemed fairly tuned in to both her sides, but the feeling of not quite belonging is relatable.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Netgalley for the free arc! An interesting and reflective graphic memoir that is separated into distinct graphic essays. Leise Hook explores her identify as a multi-racial child, teenager, and then adult. Since her mom is Asian and her dad is white, she explores the implications of being Asian, yet not looking quite Asian enough at times and not looking quite white enough at others.

[Shana · Rating 3 out of 5]

If the book is about being biracial/multiracial/mixed, you can pretty reliably predict that I am going to request it on NetGalley. That's how I found myself with Names and Faces, a perfectly serviceable graphic memoir about the author's experience. No notes on the content itself, but for the delivery I will say that it didn't stick with me. Perhaps the style was different from my own preference. I am sure there are others who will find it compelling and resonant, though.

[Nancy Cao · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this. I don't usually read graphic novels, but I found the medium very compelling for bringing you into the author's interior perspective and communicating emotional experiences. I loved the middle long essays about photography, her grandmother, and her experience working in Beijing especially. There was a lot to relate to even if you are not biracial about searching for belonging and developing your identity.

[Haruka · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would like to say thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me a chance to read this book in advanced. Here is my honest review.
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I would give this book a 3.5 star rating. The book is great. I love that the author wanted to show that everyone in this world is different. Every names, faces, language, everything is different for everybody. It a great memoir to read.