Late 19th century China, and an unwanted fourth child is born to a peasant family - so unwanted, she’s not even given a real name, just a designation of the order she was born and her sex: Four-Girl. As she endures a horrible childhood, Four-Girl discovers Christianity though, unfortunately, the Boxer Rebellion is in full swing, with the rebels killing anyone from the West and/or Christian. Which side will Four-Girl choose - her country or her faith?
Saints is the companion book to Boxers although I feel it’s a largely superfluous addition. At even half the length of Boxers, Saints didn’t need its own book. Besides fleshing out an incidental character from Boxers - where we see Four-Girl briefly at the start and then briefly at the end, so we already know her fate (assuming you’re reading this in order) - and providing some more information on what happened to Little Bao at the end, there really isn’t much to this one.
I thought the idea behind separating the story between Boxers and Saints was for Gene Luen Yang to provide different perspectives on the Boxer Rebellion but that’s not really the case. I guess we see why some Chinese might choose Christianity, assuming their lives were as difficult as Four-Girl’s was, but it’s not really insightful.
I’m not sure why the colouring is so drastically different in this book either. It’s almost entirely in shades of black and white with the hallucination sequences appearing in gold colouring. Like Little Bao hallucinating the first Emperor of China, Four-Girl hallucinates Joan of Arc (canonised as a saint not long after the Boxer Rebellion, in 1920).
Maybe the colouring choice was to underscore the misery of Four-Girl’s life and the appeal of escapism that Christianity offered her? But then Little Bao’s life wasn’t great either and yet Boxers was fully coloured throughout.
I liked Four-Girl as a protagonist - she’s such an upbeat, plucky person despite having nothing but crap thrown her way, and I was always rooting for her. And it’s not badly written or wholly uninteresting. I liked the subplot involving Dr Won, and that Four-Girl is tragically vindicated in her belief at the end.
It’s just that Saints is largely irrelevant and didn’t need its own book. If Yang had been selective about the scenes, they could’ve been easily incorporated into Boxers to form one complete book rather than a mostly pointless second book. Boxers is definitely worth reading but Saints is an easily skippable second and final volume, for completists only.
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