Advance Review: Water Baby
1.
Ross Campbell's Water Baby desperately tries to be something unique. You can feel it wanting your approval with its dogpile of quirky characters and an opening hook (attractive, bisexual, booger-eating surfer girl Brody loses her leg to a shark) straight out of a very sincere indie film. In fact, by the time you get to the slacker ex-boyfriend puking all over himself, prompting a road trip you've got the next Diablo Cody screenplay.
2.
I'm not a prude, but it seems to be established fairly early in the book that the leads are minors ("You don't even have a license and I can't drive after 10!") and there's more cleavage and sideboob on display here than in entire seasons of Baywatch. I'm not quite sure if that's actually what the Minx target audience wants to look at, really. It's a shame, as Campbell's a very accomplished cartoonist with a nice handling of body language and storytelling, but the skeeve factor creeped into Dead@17 levels for me.
3.
Campbell does very, very little to establish the people around whom Water Baby is centered as anything more than the most plastic of mannequins that spew only-occasionally-interesting dialogue, making it hard to care about what happens to whom or why. It's telling that the most interesting character to me was Louisa, Brody's best friend cum former lover, who's down to earth, funny, and unfortunately given very little to do besides be Brody's best friend cum former lover.
4.
The ending of this book is the most disappointing denouement I've encountered in some time, with Campell apparently trying to sprinkle on some of that old time Clowesian disaffection for storytelling conventions and instead looking like he simple stopped typing when he hit the 156-page mark. There's no emotional or thematic resolution, just a dangling plot that made me wonder if this was part one in a series and nobody bothered to tell the readers.
5.
Yes, just like they did with The Plain Janes.
