If Mark Trail met Jeff Corwin met Steve Irwin met Fabien Cousteau, you would have Hawai’i Sea Turtle Rescue. Fabien Cousteau is the grandson to the famous Jacques Cousteau, and he seems to have an equal passion for wildlife and the ocean. He also seems to have a high opinion of himself, and the first few pages of this fiction formatted non-fiction graphic novel talks about the wonderful things he has accomplished (working with sharks, finding new species of piranha). With that humble bragging aside, this is a good book. Even if it does also lean a little heavy on the “preachy side” of talking about environmentalism.
Okay, I am not giving this the best review. I do not think kids ages eight and up will see these issues, it is just that there were some small things my adult reading eye was wondering about. But what Cousteau and James O. Fraioli is saying is important.
It is a great reminder for what we can and should be doing to help protect the ocean and in turn, the world around us. Nature is in danger from our waste and our actions. And the story shows the results of that. We see the ghost nets (fishing nets fishermen toss aside and end up in the ocean capturing turtles and other things), the fact that our clothes are made of pieces of plastic that keep getting back into the ecosystem. And even how that will affect us (plastics get into the ocean, the smaller animals eat plastic, the bigger animals keep eating the smaller creatures until we finally eat the fish with the plastic in them).
Bold and bright images by Joe St. Pierre and heavy on conversation text, the story and facts (sometimes within the conversations and sometimes to the side and/or bottom of pages) are side-by-side as we explore Hawaii and the wildlife that lives there.