The water in this story is brown. You cannot see your own feet standing in it. Everything that happened in Matawan Creek in July 1916 followed from that, and a drawn panel gives a child that fact instantly, where a sentence has to ask them to imagine it.
This is Lauren Tarshis's second book redrawn. Chet Roscow, his friends, a New Jersey summer, and a fin where a fin has no business being. Text adapted by Georgia Ball, art by Haus Studio. Graphic novel two in the drawn line, $10.99, with a nonfiction section at the back carrying historical photographs and facts about the real attacks.
The paperback of the same story is on our shelf for a good deal less. This note is about what the difference buys.
The science it actually teaches
The prose edition carries the argument, which is what people wrongly believed in 1916 and which animal it actually was, a question still unsettled. That is an argument about evidence and it lives in sentences. This edition earns its place on the Stealth Science shelf on a completely different subject: how an animal finds a person in water nobody can see through. That is anatomy, and anatomy is a diagram.
Smell does most of the long distance work. A very large share of a shark's brain is given over to it, and the nostrils sit far apart on the head on purpose, because comparing what the left side smells against what the right side smells is how the animal knows which way to turn. It is not following a smell so much as steering by a difference.
Closer in, the lateral line takes over. A row of tiny pressure sensors runs down each flank and reads movement in the water at a distance. A person thrashing at the surface is loud in a sense that has nothing to do with sound. A person floating still is not.
Closer still, the strangest one. The snout is covered in small pores filled with jelly, the ampullae of Lorenzini, and they read the faint electric fields that any moving muscle makes. A heartbeat makes one. In the last few feet, in water like that creek, this is the sense doing the work.
Which puts sight last, and that reverses what every child assumes. In brown water vision is the weakest of the four, and the animal has generally arrived already knowing where you are. The eyes are for the final second.
Then the exploratory bite, which explains the pattern in nearly every shark encounter anyone has ever had. A shark has no hands. If it wants to know what something is, the mouth is the only instrument it owns, and most bites on people are a single bite followed by the animal leaving. That is why most bites are not fatal. It is true, it is worth knowing, and it is no comfort at all to the person bitten, and a child can hold both of those at once.
And one that only the drawn edition can teach. Panic is a behaviour too, and it can be shown. Emptied beaches, crowds at the water's edge, boats going out to kill any shark that could be found. A picture of a frightened town in 1916 is a piece of evidence about people, and it belongs next to the evidence about animals.
The child it lands with
Ask any seven year old to name a shark part and you will get teeth. That child, the one whose interest in sharks is really an interest in bodies, is who this edition is built for, because it can put the nose and the flank and the pores on the page and label what they do.
Then the obvious one. A child who will not sit with a hundred pages of prose. This is the version of this story that they will actually finish, and finishing matters more than format.
And the child who read the paperback a while back and remembers the plot but not the animal. Coming back to the same events with the anatomy visible is not a re-read.
One place to stop and talk
The panel to stop on is the one where the water is opaque and the fin is small.
Ask what the shark already knows about Chet at that moment, before either of them can see the other. The answer is most of it: the smell has been there for a while, the movement has been readable for a while, and the electric field is the last piece, not the first. A child who works that out has the sensory order right, which is more than most adults have.
What to know going in
Everything in the chapter book's caution applies, and one more thing applies on top of it, which is the reason this note exists separately.
Drawn, this is heavier. Prose keeps the worst of a shark attack behind a sentence and a child's eye can slide past it. A panel does not offer that. The attack in brown water, drawn, is the single hardest image in either edition of this story, and a child meets it whether they were ready or not.
The real deaths stand behind it. Four people died along that coast in twelve days in July 1916. Two of them died in the creek: a boy of eleven, and the man who went into the water to bring him out. Chet is invented and Chet survives.
The back matter carries real photographs from 1916, including the hunt that followed. Several children find that section harder than the drawn attack, and it is worth a parent turning to the back first.
And the water fear is stronger from pictures than from print. If your child is already uneasy about swimming, this is the wrong edition of the wrong book this year.
Where to get it
It is $10.99 at I Survived the Shark Attacks of 1916 graphic novel, which is close to double the paperback of the identical story.
What the extra buys is the anatomy and the water. Not more plot, not a longer book. If that is what your child needs to hold the science, it is money well spent and I would spend it. If your child reads prose without a fight, buy the paperback and put the difference somewhere else.
Buying both is only sensible in a house with two children at different reading points, or where one child read the other version long enough ago that this is genuinely a new pass at it. Children do that. It is not a thing to plan a purchase around.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
California Wildfires, 2018 in Panels: How Fire Moves
I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived Graphic Novel #13) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
Hurricane Katrina, 2005: Why They Could Not Leave
I Survived Hurricane Katrina, 2005 (I Survived Graphic Novel #6) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967: Who Fed the Bears
I Survived the Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967 (I Survived #17) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
California Wildfires, 2018: A Fire Starts Years Early
I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived #20) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
