Blog Tour | Shark Summer by Ira Marcks | Review

“Shark Summer is bursting with vibrant, expressive art….The characters are distinct and relatable…It’s a lovely read!”—Molly Knox Ostertag, author of the Witch Boy series

“Eloquently chronicled in Marcks’s cinematic panels, friendships are formed and repaired, parental relationships articulated, and inner conflicts expressed and resolved. A winning production.” —Kirkus

When a Hollywood film crew arrives on Martha’s Vineyard with a mechanical shark and a youth film contest boasting a huge cash prize, disgraced pitcher Gayle “Blue Streak” Briar sees a chance to turn a bad season into the best summer ever.

After recruiting aspiring cinematographer Elijah Jones and moody director Maddie Grey, Gayle and her crew set out to uncover the truth of the island’s own phantom shark and win the prize money. But these unlikely friends are about to discover what happens when you turn your camera toward the bad things lurking below the surface.

I didn’t know a ton about this graphic novel going in but I was prepared for it to be a fun summer story, and it was! I really enjoyed the story as we followed Gayle as she navigated summer in Martha’s Vineyard, made new friends, dealt with a movie crew on location and dove deep into an old legend. She was definitely a complex character with not only issues that a lot of teens face, but she’s also having a crisis of identity due to what happened in her last baseball game, plus those she thought were her friends maybe aren’t as good of friends as she thought. While the plot has lots of components to it, I felt they were all wrapped up really well by the end of the graphic novel.

Ira Marcks is a cartoonist living in Upstate New York with his wife, two cats, a dog, and lots of books he’s been meaning to read. His love for ancient magic and possible futures has led him to create a warehouse of esoteric objects for the Hugo Award-winning magazine Weird Tales and to tell stories about villainous technology for the European Research Council. Shark Summer is his debut graphic novel.

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Happy reading!