Everything is Teeth. Everything is teeth, which is to say that the young Evie, terrified by, obsessed, and completely captivated with sharks, tends to associate all of her fears about her young self and her loved ones with the possibility of sharks mutilating her and them.
Evie’s brother gets a shark jaw bone as a gift. Evie’s childhood curiosity, coupled with a very early viewing of Spielberg’s Jaws, and fueled by her very vivid imagination, grow into an obseesion. She reads about the most brutal shark killing stories, so she imagines terrible things, and these nightmares (both real and imagined), sometimes makes this seem like a horror comic. Evie learns everything she can about sharks, but most of it has to do with the terrible pain and suffering they can inflict on anyone they come in contact with. She knows stories of them, but they are never warm and cuddly shark stories. She listens mainly to everything horrific about sharks, which feeds her fears.
Meanwhile, difficult things happen in her family, and they are not discussed openly, and she is aware of them without fully being able to articulate how they affect her, so they become interpreted through the lens of her shark fears. Wyld’s family both encourages and discourages her interest in sharks, and that inextricably intertwines all the emotional family events with the fear of sharks.
The wonderful and strange artwork by Joe Sumner matches the story perfectly. The sharks, and the injuries & mutilations they cause are shown in realistic detail, while Evie and all the people she encounters are much more sparse sketches.
An excellent and quick read.