Water Baby ~ Ross Campbell

Title: Water Baby
Author: Ross Campbell
Publisher: DC Comics, 156 pages
Copyright: 2008


School Library Journal Review:

Gr 10 Up -Surfer girl Brody is attacked by a shark and wakes up in the hospital to find most of one leg missing and her life changed. Brody, who is bisexual, has always been self-reliant, and while she remains tough to outsiders, her friends see her moments of weakness and despair. After she learns to walk with her artificial leg, she asks her friend Louisa (who has bisexual potential) to help drive her deadbeat, live-in ex-boyfriend Jake (who is girl-crazy) back home. Meanwhile, Brody continues to have nightmares about sharks: about her friends being attacked by one, or about becoming one herself. Brody and Louisa are black while Jake and several of his lovers are white. The artwork is well conceived, mostly realistic but blurring into the fantastic when Brody has one of her (mostly wordless) nightmares. The cover is phenomenal; the profile of the top half of Brody's body is striking enough to make most teens stare at it for a few moments longer, maybe even picking it up to see if her lower half continues on the back cover. It does, and when they see her one real leg and one artificial one, curious readers and those who love survivor stories will want to find out what happens to this unusual girl.-Andrea Lipinski, New York Public Library

Review: 
Brody is a female Florida surfer. Or she was, until she became the first victim in a string of shark attacks along the coast, leaving her with an artificial leg, a bitter outlook on life, and nightmares about sharks that haunt her even when she's not sleeping. 

Even after her physical recovery, she constantly dreams that she is turning into a shark or is being eaten by a shark, sometimes two sharks.  Also after her accident, her love life appears to be a complete mess. Her ex-boyfriend, Jake, begs for her attention by parking himself on her couch and spending days (or weeks) there, while she sleeps with her ex-girlfriend in the next bed. In order to escape his puppy eyes, she goes on a road trip with her friends and dumps him in New York.


I picked Water Baby because of the fantastic cover (and because I love anything-shark). I thought who is this girl with tattoos, a shaved head, and mixed ethnicity? Then, I turned the book over and she is wearing combat boots and a prosthetic leg!  Campbell's pages look incredible. He combines beauty and terror not only in the horror elements, but in the mundane. Rather than making this story predictably about an identity crisis and learning to walk again, the plot jumps ahead a year and a half. Brody is dealing with her changed abilities, her prosthetic leg, recurring nightmares about the shark, and trying to live on her own with the help of her -more-than-just-a-friend Louisa. 


I think it's easy to simply write the whole novel off as teen hormones, angst and tragedy, but I would like to think there is an intended symbolism and depth in Campbell's work. He has established a very distinctive style, not just in how he renders things, but in tone, themes, and those little elements that make a writer's work recognizable. Water Baby has received negative reviews for how Campbell draws his characters in skimpy outfits with certain exposed body parts, raw language and subject matter, and I'd definitely recommend it to older teens for those reasons, but I found the story itself pretty compelling. 


This book might bug you if you don't like true-to-life teen dialogue, suggestive outfits, shark attack content (if it creeps you out) and abrupt endings, but it's a good read and nicely illustrated. Recommended for reluctant readers and graphic novel fans alike. 


Reading Level: Beginner
Notes about Audience: Recommended for ages 15 and up.