Water, Water ... Everywhere?

Kasey Cox

Author Lee Welles set herself a daunting task with her second book, “Gaia Girls: Way of Water.” Her first book in the series, “Gaia Girls: Enter the Earth”, won the National Outdoor Book Award and the iParenting Media Award, garnered critical acclaim, and brought her invitations for book signings at schools, libraries, and fairs across the country. That’s a hard act to follow, even for a seasoned author, but “Enter the Earth” was Welles’ first book.

Furthermore, in writing “Enter the Earth”, Lee drew from her own experiences, growing up on a farm in upstate New York. In “Way of Water”, the main character, Miho, is an American-Japanese girl who has spent her entire life traveling to Pacific Ocean ports with her whale-observing parents, while the book itself mostly takes place in Japan, where Miho must go to live when the sea claims the lives of her parents. In choosing this premise and this setting for her second story in this series, Welles breaks one of the oldest guidelines for writers – “Write what you know.”

The large focus on Japan works for Welles, though, in part because Miho has never before been to Japan. Though her mother was Japanese, and she knows a little of Japanese language and culture, Miho’s culture shock and her feelings of being an outsider with much to learn helps the reader identify with Miho, and gives the book a much deeper ring of truth than if Welles had tried to write Japan from an inside perspective. And, as the author confesses in her blog at www.gaiagirls.com, she had to do “massive amounts of research.” As Miho adjusts to the sudden, difficult changes in her life, I found her a believable, fully-developed character with whom I could easily sympathize – a heroine, in fact, who bravely deals with the death of her parents, the move to a new country and culture, and the fantastical experience of meeting a talking otter!

With the Gaia Girls series, the fantastic blends quite well into the normal experiences in the lives of the girls around whom each book centers. I am reminded of the Narnia series, or of Philip Pullman’s “Golden Compass”, where children encounter creatures and ideas beyond the scope of everyday reality. The characters respond at first with surprise, shock, disbelief, curiosity – as most of us would. Then, because children are better are adapting and using their imaginations, they accept the new creatures as comrades or foes and step forward into the quest. In this case, the quest is a very real and laudable one: to save the Earth from the damage we humans are doing. And thus is born a new kind of fantasy book for kids, a new kind of super-hero, presented in a creative and fun way, but with very practical, concrete applications.

Lee Welles’ Gaia Girls are “eco-heroines”, advocates and activists for caring for the Earth, and therefore, caring for ourselves. The message is one of environmentalism and stewardship without being too preachy. The scientific explanations, the political message is not too heavy-handed, and the storylines are exciting in and of themselves. I continued reading because I wanted to know what happens to Miho, and along the way I thought more about the amount of earth that is covered by water, the mind-boggling amount of life that inhabits our oceans, and our place in these things.