Everything Is Teeth

January 25, 2016
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.

March 15, 2016
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 dread...something watching from the dark...something 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 life...and 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.

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November 1, 2016

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 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2016
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 truethe 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 herrather, 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)