COMING-OF-AGE STORY WITH WHOLE NEW LOOK

Sea Change’s graphic design makes waves but the writing is also something to be treasured

The back cover of Frank Viva’s Sea Change offers a couple of testimonial blurbs, one of which — by graphic designer Chip Kidd — made me open the book.

“Truly heartbreaking!” it began, but that wasn’t the part that hooked me. It was the part where Kidd said Viva managed to weave words and pictures “to evoke that strange, wonderful moment — when the very worst experience of your life somehow becomes the very best.”

This alone should be enough to make you buy this book for any child (or adult) getting ready to leave the classroom (or office) behind and set out on summer vacation.

I can’t match the perfection of that assessment. But it would be lazy to just piggyback onto Kidd’s perfect words, so let me add that Sea Change is the story of Eliot Dionisi (a surname that earns him the pejorative “wop” from a town bully), who has been looking forward to the last day of school and a summer of fun and excitement with his best friends, Mike and Teddy, only to be told that he’d be spending it in Nova Scotia, with his grandmother and great-uncle Earl.

“I had worked 12 long years to get to this summer,” Eliot tells us on the opening page, “and my parents were throwing it away like chopped liver.”

What follows is an often riotously funny account of a resentful young boy who gets billeted with a cranky old uncle in Point Aconi and is forced to work a fishing boat for the summer, exposing him as incredibly inept and prone to puking over the side of the boat until he manages to find his sea legs. There are stomachchurning descriptions of shovelling dead fish crawling with maggots into buckets as bait for lobsters, and meals prepared by the uncle that consist of delicacies like tongue and onions.

But it’s not all bad. Eliot befriends a few local kids, including 13-year-old Mary Beth, who kisses him — on the lips — before the summer is through. And he learns that even the town bully has a sensitive side.

As the weeks pass, Eliot acquires some skills on the water, breaks through Uncle Earl’s crusty facade, and discovers that Point Aconi has much to commend it — not least of which is the place it occupies in his greatuncle’s heart. By the time the boy flies home, the fishing community is far from a backwater to Eliot, and he himself has changed. “I’m a whole other person now,” he tells the stewardess who recognizes him from his earlier flight.

What makes this more than just another coming-of-age story is the graphic design its author/ illustrator employs in telling the story. Readers will be reeled in by the typography. Lines of type flow in different directions, bits of text look like concrete poetry, type sizes vary, and the glossy pages aren’t always white with black type. Sometimes they’re the reverse; other times the black type graces a red page or a yellow page.

Sea Change is a great book to read on summer vacation, and an eye-opener for anyone who thought print had to follow certain rules.

Sea Change

By Frank Viva Tundra Books, 117 pages, $21.99 Age 10 and older