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Searching... Stillwater Public Library | GRAPHIC 921 WYLD | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
From the award-winning author of All the Birds, Singing, here is a deeply moving graphic memoir about family, love, loss, and the irresistible forces that, like sharks, course through life unseen, ready to emerge at any moment.
When she was a little girl, passing her summers in the heat of coastal Australia, Evie Wyld was captivated by sharks--by their innate ruthlessness, stealth, and immeasurable power--and they have never released their hold on her imagination.
Black-and-white illustrations throughout.
Author Notes
Evie Wyld won the 2014 Barnes and Noble Discover Award for her title All the Birds, Singing. This is a Great New Writers Award in the category of fiction. Wyld will receive US$10,000 and a year's worth of marketing and merchandising support for her book from B&N. The awards are part of B&N's Discover.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist Wyld (After the Fire) switches to the graphic novel format to explore the sadness of childhood in this brief, lovely memoir. Having spent her summers in coastal Australia, Wyld's infant imagination is consumed by what lurks beneath the waves. She researches shark attacks obsessively, imagines her loved ones falling prey to a Great White's jaws, and relates tales of teeth and gore to her lonely older brother. Though the book is short, the brevity concentrates the emotion of every page and panel: a simple image of a shark following Wyld down a suburban street takes on grave significance. Artist Sumner's use of photorealistic sharks in contrast with his simple line drawings is particularly powerful, though the line drawings themselves could use a little refinement. Regardless, this is a poignant, understated look into the anxiety of childhood, singular and memorable. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The story and illustrations in Everything Is Teeth are so inseparable, it's hard to believe they don't share a creator. In reality, though, novelist Wyld's memories of a girlhood spent obsessing over sharks are the spare story underlying Sumner's amazingly varied images. As a child, Londoner Evie spent holidays visiting relatives in Australia, her summers full of family time and, notably, the ever-present fear of shark attacks. Wyld's memories of her childish point-of-view ring incredibly true the huge jumps to conclusion and outsize fears, the awareness of only snippets of what's happening in the adult world, the veneration she holds for a famous attack survivor. Some things, like sharks and gory photos of victims post-attack, Sumner has sketched so precisely they appear photographic, while young Evie, her family, and the ocean itself remain appealingly, cartoonishly simple, rendered in high-contrast with washes of pale yellow and, of course, bursts of blood red. That simplicity, coupled with Wyld's crisp, deliberate writing and provocative omissions, stirringly evokes both childhood fears of catastrophe and fascination with the macabre. Ultimately, Evie's fears, as looming and terrifying as they are, don't debilitate her rather, she's steeling herself, perhaps even finding value in using irrational fears to mask rational ones, when it comes to the things she can't anticipate. This unique graphic memoir is mesmerizing.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Wyld's graphic memoir reflects on her youthful fascination with and horror of sharks and reveals glimpses of her adult life. Much of the work takes place at her family's summer home in rural, coastal Australia. Here young Evie senses sharks everywhere-in the river and ocean but also swimming next to the truck or through the crops. She finds a book called Shark Attack and idolizes Rodney Fox, a survivor whose wounds are graphically depicted. Back in Peckham, England, Evie fears sharks in her bath and while on the sofa or in her bed. Her brother starts coming home with signs of being beaten, and he takes comfort in the stories, real and imagined, that Evie tells him of shark attacks. She watches Jaws with her father as he drinks glass after glass of wine. Back in Australia, the young woman has some shark-themed excursions with her family and experiences more shark worries, including imagining her brother and mother being killed by one. Throughout, these animals are a source of dread as well as stand-ins for other anxieties. While the other members of her family display a broad range of emotions, Evie almost always looks concerned, fretful, trepidatious in the illustrations. The beak-nosed people and sparse landscapes are in stark black-and-white, with color appearing only rarely, notably in the various sea creatures depicted. VERDICT Evie's youth as well as the lure of sharks may help this title appeal to teens, though the overarching tension and the final scenes of her father's death may speak to a more mature or adult audience. For any collection where graphic memoirs are popular.-Eric Norton, McMillan Memorial Library, Wisconsin Rapids © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
Sharks cruise menacingly across the pages of this subtle and evocative autobiography Evie Wyld grew up terrified of sharks. During summer holidays on her grandparents' farm in coastal New South Wales she hoovered up stories about the man-eating chompers and how to avoid them (lie very still and play dead, according to a hearty uncle in shorts). Back home in drizzly south London, Evie carried the obsession with her, convinced that those fearsome teeth were about to appear through the plug-hole or from under the sofa. The sharks followed her as she went through an averagely un/happy suburban childhood -- hovering above her in the street, looming outside the bedroom window, staring at her through a rear-view mirror -- until their presence became almost comforting, like a sentry standing guard against other, less nameable fears. Wyld, a Costa-shortlisted novelist, uses her signature oblique style to excellent effect in conjuring up a child's world of everyday nightmares. What makes this book a radical departure, though, is that her words are accompanied by ribbons of graphic illustration. Joe Sumner has rendered Wyld's staccato narrative into a strip cartoon, complete with horror-story sharks that cruise menacingly across the pages, looking for small girls to munch. Graphic novels and memoirs are now well established in the literary landscape, from Raymond Briggs' Ethel and Ernest, a 1998 memoir of his parents' lives that scanned the great social changes of the 20th century, to Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, by Mary and Bryan Talbot, which won the Costa biography prize three years ago. Briggs and the Talbots were both published by Jonathan Cape, which has led the way in producing graphic work. So it seems entirely appropriate that Cape is also responsible for Everything Is Teeth, which continues the tradition of comic books for grownups. The graphic form is particularly suited to Wyld's narrative, which belongs to a child who only partly understands the grown-up world: meanings and understandings slip through the gaps between the frames of the cartoon, leaving the reader trying to work out, along with Evie, what is really going on. There's Mum, for instance, paddling self-consciously "because she has turned 40". And the silly doctor who smirks that urine is the best way of dealing with stingray barbs -- is he, Evie wonders, about to wee on her? Most of all there's Dad, a pallid Englishman bundled up from head to toe against the beating Australian sun, while everyone else runs around nearly nude. Sumner renders this world of mangled meanings in stark monochrome, his outlines almost naif in their simplicity. Then you turn the page and find a shark bearing down, its flesh a slithery grey, its eye a blank hole. There's a wave of blood blooming out behind and, in the distance, some twig-like human limbs, the remains of lunch. It is genuinely terrifying. Of course, these scenes are a product of Evie's morbid imagination, which has been nourished on old fisherman's tales and a book by a man called Rodney Fox, who survived an attack by a great white in the early 1960s. Sumner helpfully provides a graphic account of Fox's mutilation. As a final flourish, the shark left a tooth embedded in Fox's wrist. Gradually Evie's bloodthirsty obsession with Fox and his gruesome mauling settles into a steady background pulse, and it becomes clear that the central relationship in the book is not with the sharks or even Fox but with her awkward and adoring father. At first he appears on the edge of the frame, watching Jaws on television with a glass of wine, or taking Evie to a shabby shark museum where she nearly pukes. But then, as "A Lot Changes With Time", Dad starts to fade away in a hospital bed. It is at this point that the submerged meaning of Evie's shark obsession starts to become clear. It is the terror of losing a loved one, a terror that appears in middle childhood and swims alongside us for the rest of our lives. * To order Everything Is Teeth for [pound]12.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Kathryn Hughes.
Kirkus Review
A graphic memoir that proceeds like a young girl's powerfully disturbing dream, which continues to resonate through her waking hours. An award-winning novelist in Britain, Wyld (All the Birds, Singing, 2014, etc.) pares down her prose within a narrative that might not have the length of even a very short story but has the resonance of a tone poem. It also features the illustrations of Sumner, making his debut here, capturing both the comic-strip innocence of the perspective of the author as a young girl and the majesty and the terror of the sharks that are her obsession, a foreboding presence both underwater and beneath the surface of her consciousness. Within her subconscious, as in a dream, those sharks become manifest, take over the full spread of two pages, rendering words unnecessary. Written in the plainspoken diction of the small child who begins the narrative, Wyld describes formative impressions at the seashore of rural Australia, of seeing a shark, or at least conjuring the fin, memories that will lead to an obsession she will pursue in her reading and that will remain with her when she moves to England and has no sea nearby. The obsession is like a foreboding: "There is a constant creeping dreadsomething watching from the darksomething waiting to strike" [ellipses are the author's]. She senses the possibility of sharks when she's taking a bath, and she feels that dark undercurrent in the bloody scars of her bullied brother. She returns for a visit in Australia, she grows older, she flashes forward, and her sense of sharklike foreboding underscores her recognition of mortality: "The ebb and flow of lifeand death," she muses while reaching on the shelf for a book titled Shark Attack! A rite-of-passage memoir that has powerful poetry in its ellipses. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The centerpiece of this autobiographical graphic novel from award winner Wyld (All the Birds, Singing) is the author's obsession as a young child with sharks. Her fascination with these creatures begins during family vacations in Australia, where she starts to imagine them coming to get her in the bath, in the swimming pool, and rising from the carpet, leaving her safe only on the couch. She also projects these horrors onto her family, visualizing sharks devouring her brother and mother while they are swimming in the ocean. The fish embody her anxieties not only of loss but also of the unknown. To Wyld, growing up is likened to a shark, stealthy and fearsome. Using a mostly black-and-white palette, with a few colors that stand out impeccably, illustrator Sumner evokes the innocence of youth with his cartoonish style alongside the stark contrast of a child's dreaded fixation appearing more realistic. Verdict This beautifully written story will interest anyone whose fears as a child-whether sharks or other scary monsters-seemed all consuming.-Lucy Roehrig, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
