Shawn Loves Sharks by Curtis Manley (review)

To say Shawn loves sharks is an understatement; obsession or mania might be better terms. When he’s not drawing sharks or reading about sharks or watching shark movies, he’s channeling sharks and terrorizing kids on the playground with his CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP-ing. There’s trouble in the waters, though, when his teacher announces a project on predators, and Shawn is assigned the topic of leopard seals; even worse, his frequent playground victim, Stacy, gets the great white shark. She won’t trade, she can’t be bribed with cookies, and she soon revels in the delicious information that sharks prey on leopard seals. Game on. Stacy the shark now chases Shawn around the playground until he makes the nasty observation that she’s a pretty unimpressive shark if she’s not fast enough to catch a leopard seal. Now Stacy’s in tears, and Shawn needs to refocus on human behavior rather than the sanguinary law of the wild to make things right. Subisak’s illustrations cleverly capture Shawn’s comic yet problematic overidentification with his favorite predator, portraying him in a shark’s body and putting his long-suffering cat into a fish body when Shawn is in shark mode and a penguin body when the kid is channeling the leopard seal. Not every listener will welcome the shift from Shawn’s comeuppance at the hands of newly empowered Stacy to his readiness to make amends, but Shawn’s classmates will certainly appreciate his redemption.