Water Baby by Ross Campbell (MINX)Water Baby (2008) is writ­ten and illus­trated by Ross Camp­bell . In it, he tells the story of a young teen-age girl name Brody, who sur­vives a shark attack. My reac­tion to the story is kind of mix bag of emo­tions that ranged from baf­fle­ment to dis­in­ter­est. I’m not sure that I “get” what it is the author is try­ing to say with this story.

Admit­tedly Brody’s char­ac­ter was a chal­lenge for me. She has tats, she is crude and she lis­tens to heavy metal music. She is also a sur­vivor of a shark attack that resulted in her wear­ing a pros­thetic leg. Her story made the local news in Florida because of the recent spike in shark attacks of late. Any­way, a year has passed since the inci­dent and she’s still hav­ing crazy night­mares about sharks and she often times suf­fers from phan­tom pain.

Brody’s best friend Louisa moves in with her and helps her with the phys­i­cal ther­apy and recov­ery. She doesn’t want her mother’s help with any of it. Brody’s ex-boyfriend, Jake, who comes across as a com­plete air­head, shows up look­ing for some­place to crash. He eats them out of house and home and wears out his wel­come after a few days. Fed up, Brody and her friend decide to drive him back home to Rochester, New York and along the way, they pick up a hitch­hiker name Chrissie, another air­head. And so the road trip com­mences forth with some pre­dictable surprises.

No doubt Brody wants things to be nor­mal again but for me, I didn’t see very much change in her char­ac­ter out­side of the lim­i­ta­tions placed on her due to the loss of her leg. Maybe that’s the point. I don’t know. I’m not sure what the author was try­ing to con­vey here or the mes­sage he’s try­ing to con­vey to his ado­les­cent read­ers. I reread this graphic novel like twice try­ing to deci­pher the mes­sage but came away clue­less as to the objec­tive of this story. The premise is an inter­est­ing one but unfor­tu­nately, it just wasn’t exe­cuted well.

There wasn’t much in the way of a romance here other than the les­bian rela­tion­ship that was hinted at between Brody and Louisa, who had sup­pos­edly “hooked up” at one time but now they’re just great pals. And the hitch­hiker they picked up, Chrissie, hits on Louisa but she declines. After Brody’s break-up with Jake, she swears off men for good. Ok, what­ever. Next, you have your usual teen scene of surf­ing and par­ty­ing with the accom­pa­ny­ing pop cul­ture dia­logue. As for char­ac­ter­i­za­tions, we see Brody act out defen­sively about her stump and grap­ple with the fact that she is a crip­ple. Then the author goes on to illus­trate her vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties but as far as what is going inside Brody, that part of her remained elu­sive to me. Sure she con­tem­plates her lim­i­ta­tions but I never felt I really got to know her.

Bot­tom line is that there was a lot in this story that was ambigu­ous — Brody’s back­ground for one. Char­ac­ter­i­za­tions were thin at best which doesn’t work for me. The art­work was fine but I just wish the story had more com­plex­ity. I thought this would have been a great story about a teen-age girl recov­er­ing after a life chang­ing event but alas, the story falls sadly flat. I remem­ber start­ing this title when I first received it and had put it down more than once. The story never pulled me in. I could have did with­out all the “heh’s, hehehe’s and hahaha’s” inserted into every other sen­tence in the dia­logue, other than that, my response to this story was luke­warm. With that said, Water Baby is the weak­est title so far from this imprint, IMO, so my grade, C-.

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