A new graphic novel by Caldecott Award-winning author and illustrator Dan Santat. According to the author's notes, this book took over ten years to complete, and is dedicated to his late father, who lost the battle to cancer while this book was being created.
The Aquanaut is the story of Sophia Revoy, the daughter of scientist Michel Revoy, who dies in a boating accident when Sophie is young. Michel was a marine scientist who, along with his brother, worked at preserving oceans and marine wildlife. Uncle Paul promises to care for and raise Sophie, but gets overwhelmed with his work and a mean-spirited boss who wants to profit from marine animals at Aqualand, an equivalent to Sea World, which is a sort of zoo for marine animals. The story gets fantastical from there and some marine creatures find Michel's underwater suit and bring it back to life, finding Sophie and trying to save Aqualand from the mean boss.
The artwork in this book is wonderful, as you might guess from an award-winning artist. Sadly, the storyline is really bad. My description here is probably better than the story as it's written in the book. The overall notion of the story is fun and fantastic, but the details that we, as readers, look for (and sometimes take for granted, when an author does a really good job of storytelling!) are missing or very clunky, at best. In short, the artwork is wonderful, the storyline is decent, but the writing and storytelling is poor. If you like marine animals and marine science, the artwork might get you through this okay. Otherwise, there are so many other, better, graphic novels out there to discover. It's too bad, as Santat describes the personal history behind creating this book, which makes me really want to like it more. But ugh, I can't. 2 paws for the art, and a weak 1 paw for the story itself. 3 paws total, and that's a gift.
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