Never having been a 9-year-old boy, I can’t say for sure, but… if I had been, then I would have loved screenwriter EJ Altbacker’s new series, Shark Wars. Easily identifiable character-types, sharks, fierce action, sharks, high stakes conflict, sharks, quick pacing, sharks, and highly cinematic detail, (and did I mention sharks?), combine into an easily readable series for 8-12 year old boys (and some girls too). These books are perfectly positioned for an animated life and already have a free game for smartphones. Altbacker hooks his readers quickly and the attempts at conveying life lessons – choosing true friends over popularity, bullying, holding true to oneself, and doing the right thing – are presented in the straightforward way of afternoon cartoons, which is just the right format in a book like this one. Like other books by Hollywood screenwriters (Killer Pizza and Alienated), there’s not much to recommend by way of plot, character development, and subtlety in Shark Wars, but that’s not why boys who like high-action, easy read books would pick them up.
The action in the first installment of Shark Wars centers around Gray, a “teenage” reef shark who is big for his age, always hungry, and always testing the boundaries of his quiet home turf. His shark community, known as a shiver, is a peace-loving, isolationist group content to live quietly on a coral reef, out of the fray and dangers of the open ocean (the Big Blue) and the threats of more fierce shark shivers battling for control of the limited resources and hunting grounds. When Gray’s appetite and carelessness get him exiled from Coral Shiver, he and his best friend, a dog shark named Barkley, strike out on their own to see what awaits them in the Big Blue. Gray and Barkley run into a small group of rogue sharks who’ve all fled from their former shivers for various, private reasons, and this rag-tag group of misfits forms their own shiver. But this little rogue band can’t stay under the radar for very long, and soon a big, tough band of sharks forces them to make a hard choice: join Goblin Shiver and its to-the-death war with Razor Shiver, or be eaten alive by Goblin and his merciless allies. Nothing is quite what it seems in this eat or be eaten world, and Gray has some hard lessons to learn fast if he and his friends will survive to hunt another day.
- Posted by Cori