Boxers & Saints Books in Order

Boxers & Saints is a two-part historical graphic novel set during the Boxer Rebellion in China. The key idea is simple and powerful: Gene Luen Yang tells the same violent era from two different points of view. One book is Boxers, centered on Little Bao. The other is Saints, centered on a girl called Four-Girl, later Vibiana. Read together, they create a fuller picture than either could alone.

Little Bao's story is about anger turning into movement.

He sees foreign soldiers and missionaries abusing ordinary people, and he is drawn into the Boxer uprising through a mix of patriotism, spiritual vision, and rage. Yang does not flatten that path into pure heroism. Bao is young, sincere, and often moving, but the book keeps asking what happens when a just grievance becomes organized violence.

Saints shifts the lens. Four-Girl is an unwanted daughter who finds belonging with Christian converts and missionaries. Her part of the story is smaller and more intimate at first, but it opens onto the same historical storm from the other side. This is what makes the pair work so well. Yang refuses to reduce the conflict to easy villains and heroes. Every camp includes people acting out of fear, conviction, cruelty, love, and desperation.

There are fantasy elements, especially in the visions and spiritual imagery, but the emotional tone stays grounded. Yang is interested in faith, identity, shame, and the way history crushes ordinary people who never asked to become symbols. Lark Pien's inking helps the books feel vivid without romanticizing the violence.

These are not light reads, but they are very readable. If you want historical fiction that gives you argument as well as story, Boxers & Saints is one of Yang's most ambitious works. It asks readers to sit with contradiction, and that is exactly why the series lingers.