How do you explain your heart to someone when you don’t share enough vocabulary to truly elaborate your feelings?

How do you show someone you love them when they’re on the other side of the world?

How do you find the courage to trust that others will love you when someone you’ve always trusted is telling you not that you’ve done something wrong but that you are wrong?

You find a story, and if it’s the right story, it will bring magic with it.

In The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen, 13-year old Tiêń and his mother share all kinds of stories. She tells him about her life in Vietnam and her escape, about coming to America and making a life there. They take turns reading fairy tales from all over the world so she can improve her English and he can share what he knows with her.

Tiêń is also working hard to write his own story – his coming-out story – one he desperately wants to share with his mother, but just when he’s ready, she has to return to Vietnam to attend her mother’s funeral. While she’s gone, Tiêń is accidentally outed to the faculty at his Catholic school and they try to rewrite his history, to take away something that makes him fundamentally him… simply because they don’t agree with whom he loves.

How will he explain it all to his mother when she returns? What will she think? Which story will she choose?

I’m going to tell you straight out that I cried while I read this book, which is not a thing that happens very often. There is so much hope and so much hurt in these pages – so much to mourn and so much to celebrate. So much I remember and understand and so much I can never understand because I’m third-generation American, and my parents and I know the same words but, as I read and reflected, I realized we very rarely speak the same language.

Because I remember coming out to them as bi and how they didn’t understand… and how they don’t understand now, even though it’s been 20+ years. For the first time in a long time, I held up and examined something I’ve given up trying to explain or make them understand.

And here is a young man I admire to the ends of the earth because even when the highest authority in his life is telling him what he feels is wrong, that who he is needs to change, he refuses to relinquish his soul.

He holds tight to his story. And his mother, who has every reason to fear upheaval, to fear more change, finds a way to tell him that no matter what comes, she will always choose his story, always support him, always love him.

We should all have a mother like that.

Nguyen’s art is as beautiful as the stories it helps to tell, with fluid lines and colors that shift to help readers identify which tale within the larger whole they’re immersed in on a given page. The jewel tones are rich and saturated, which brings the illustrations to vivid life, grounding even the most fantastical parts of the fairy tales solidly in Tiêń’s world and helping the reader feel, on a visceral level, how much they mean to him and his mother, and how they connect mother and son.

We grown folks like to talk about how hard “adulting” is, but we often forget that kids and teens have to do all the same work we do while they’re still figuring out how to be people. We like to joke about how dramatic 13-year-olds are, but think of everything they’re thinking and feeling and encountering for the first time and then layer on social expectations and parental expectations, and then, in Tiêń’s case, the added responsibility of being a first-generation American, a keeper of your parent’s culture, and queer in a religious setting (where the clergy, people to whom you’ve told your innermost secrets and confessed your “sins,” will tell you not that you’ve made a mistake but that you are a mistake).

I am a whole-ass adult and I don’t think I’d be able to process all of that, let alone without losing my shit on the regular. I don’t know many people who could, even with stories.

None of us can do it without them.

So never underestimate the power of a teenager.

Never underestimate the power of a teenager with stories.

And never underestimate the power of a teenager with a story to tell.

The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen (Random House Graphic) is scheduled for release on October 13.