Livingston Press, member, Publishers Association of the South
“Specializing in offbeat & Southern literature”
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PRESS RELEASE
Author: Jaimee Wriston Colbert
Title: Shark Girls
Interest: contemporary literary fiction, Hawaii
Release date: November 30, 2009
ISBN, trade paper: 978-1-60489-044-0 price: ($16.95)
ISBN, library binding: 978-1-60489-043-3 price: ($27.00)
Library of Congress #: applied for
Length: 330 pages
Size: 6 x 9
Press Run: 3,000
Wholesalers: Ingram, Baker and Taylor, Brodart, Blackwell North America, Ambassador Book
Service, Yankee Book Peddler, Midwest Library Services, Coutt’s Library Services, and others.
Distributors: Small Press Distribution (SPD)
Online: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Independent Booksellers (IPPY)
Bio Notes: Jaimee Wriston Colbert is the author of a linked stories collection, Dream Lives of
Butterflies, which won the gold medal in the 2008 Independent Publisher Awards in the Short
Stories Fiction category; a novel, Climbing the God Tree, winner of the Willa Cather Fiction
Prize; and the fiction collection Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile, winner of the Zephyr
Publishing Prize. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Originally
from Hawaii, she is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Binghamton University, State
University of New York.
Description: Shark Girls is about two women whose lives are transformed by a shark attack that
amputates a child’s leg. It is narrated by “Scat,” the older sister of the victim, now a reformed
drunk and a “disaster photographer,” alternating with the story of “Gracie,” a casualty of a
disfiguring accident, who becomes obsessed with "Shark Girl," as the younger sister is known,
rumored to have supernatural powers, who at the start of the novel has disappeared.
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a line of contemporary fiction.
Praise for Jaimee Wriston Colbert
For Shark Girls, Livingston Press, November 2009:
“Colbert’s Shark Girls is a mesmerizing novel, vibrant with eroticism, myth, and mystery.”
-Madison Smartt Bell, author, All Souls’ Rising
“This novel is so original and strange that it's hard to put a label on it, yet it has the lively detail
and bold characterization and compelling plot that always make a good novel. I was captivated
by the bold twists and turns, as well as the sharp and inventive language, and I was drawn in by
the fascinating lore and setting of Hawaii.”
-Bobbie Ann Mason, author, In Country: A Novel
“Jaimee Wriston Colbert’s Shark Girls is as inventive as any novel I have read in a long time, the
prose boisterous and perfectly mastered to tell this story about home and leave-taking, and about
the quirky and unrelenting desire of the heart to find itself. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes
poignantly, even disturbingly sad, it is, finally, and in every word, tender and original and as
compassionate a look at character and place as you’re apt to find anywhere. Shark Girls
dazzles. A remarkable achievement.
-Jack Driscoll, author, How Like an Angel
For Dream Lives of Butterflies, Bookmark Press, October, 2007:
(First-place gold medal winner, 2008 Independent Publishers Awards; finalist, USABookNews
Best Books of 2007 Awards and ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards. Listed in the
Kansas City Star’s Top 100 Books of the Year.)
Evocative images of specimen butterflies, their broken bodies permanently suspended in time
and pinned in place, suffuse Colbert's inventively interconnected stories of fragile yet defiant
people whose lives immutably sway in a limbo between uncertainty and endurance…Colbert's
incandescent protagonists manage to find a sliver of salvation, a glimmer of grace, through the
timeless act of simply reaching out to another human being.
-Carol Haggas, Booklist
"Colbert's words are like magic...it is her brilliant exploration of that no-man's land between
what we desire and what we must live without that defines Colbert's deep empathy for her
characters."
- Kim Barnes, author, A Country Called Home
“Dream Lives of Butterflies is full of startling wisdom and high-flown humor. Jaimee Wriston
Colbert’s characters are complete originals; full of sass and attitude, they struggle with the
cultural tension between worlds and lives. Readers will love following these people on their fullhearted, rambunctious adventures.”
-Diana Abu-Jaber, author, Origins
For Climbing the God Tree, Helicon Nine, 1998
(winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Prize):
…Colbert has a knack for creating vivid characters and handles well the novel's recurring themes
of loss and retribution.
-Publisher’s Weekly
"A debut novel set in a haunted Maine town. Eerie, understated, and deft. Colbert uses
atmosphere the way David Lean uses scenery."
-Kirkus Reviews
"The scope of Jaimee Wriston Colbert's storytelling is impressive, with no fewer than 16 central
characters delineated in intricately overlapping narratives…The stories stand on their own as
sensitive and unsentimental evocations of unrelieved loss."
-The New York Times Book Review
"Jaimee Wriston Colbert looks deeply into the ragged places in our psyches—into the parts of us
torn open by loss and by failed love—and reveals our humanity in all its beauty and
imperfection. Here is a writer who, in powerfully linked stories, movingly evokes both our
craving for the sacred and our tenacious embrace of the profane."
–Dawn Raffel, Judge, Willa Cather Fiction Prize
“Climbing the God Tree is an intricate cat’s cradle of obsession, desire, compassion, and hope.
Jaimee Wriston Colbert holds back nothing—in each of these finely interwoven lives, I
recognize something of my own. An extraordinary novel.”
-A Manette Ansay, author, River Angel
For Sex, Salvation & the Automobile, Zephyr Publishing, 1994
(Winner of the 1993 Zephyr Publishing Literary Competition in Fiction)
“Jaimee Wriston Colbert’s stories are composed with a lovely and delicate lyric touch, with
elegant and unusual turns of plot, and with a spine of surprising psychological toughness. This is
an excellent collection.”
-Madison Smartt Bell, author, All Souls Rising
“…Jaimee Wriston Colbert writes stories of real women and men engaged in real ways with the
real world. Her characters are people we know, living in our neighborhood, their words as close
as can be to our own. Colbert sees to it that we feel for these individuals, recognize our own
loves and fears in theirs, and as a result know ourselves just a little better. This is a wise and
wonderful book of stories”
-David Citino, author, The Eye of the Poet
Author's Take - Shark Girls, by Jaimee Wriston Colbert
It is the 1960s in Hawai'i, and Susan Catherine Beever - Scat, for short - is watching her family
disintegrate. Her younger sister's leg was bitten off by a shark, and the once-vibrant “Willa” has
been bedridden and silent ever since. Jaycee, their mother, has closed off from the family,
moving her husband out of their bedroom and Willa into it, then losing herself to gin. Scat grows
up learning life from sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.
Thirty years later and 6000 miles away, Gracie Kathleen McKneely takes a housekeeping
position at a boarding house in coastal Maine. Her room, she soon discovers, was previously
occupied by a woman known only as "Shark Girl." According to the boarding house's other
tenants--and tabloid reports dating back to the 1980s--Shark Girl, after losing a leg to a shark,
had a new one grow back in its place, and is rumored to have healing powers. Gracie, herself a
victim of an accident that disfigured her face, immediately feels drawn to Shark Girl and
embarks on an increasingly obsessive journey to discover the truth about this woman-turnedlegend.
Shark Girls was inspired by a real shark attack in 1958, off the coast of O'ahu, and the novel uses
facts and actual news articles from this event along with my own research into Hawaiian
mythology and shark biology. I was just a little girl when Billy Weaver's leg was bitten off by a
15 foot tiger shark, growing up in Kailua, a town away from Lanikai, where it happened. But I
still remember the uproar it caused in the islands, and the boats that went out hunting and
slaughtering any shark they saw in revenge. Whether from fear or sensation, this event made a
huge impression on me and I grew up never forgetting it-and eventually, after I became a writer,
knew someday I would tell this story. Of course, as a fiction writer I wanted to tell my own
story, but somehow basing it on this event. Plus, I wanted to respect Billy Weaver's memory and
his family's loss; their story is their story.
As a child from an old island family, I grew up with Hawaiian mythology as prevalent as any
religion-in fact, in my case, more so. I loved the stories and believed in many of them,
particularly the mythology involving the volcano goddess, Pele. I was fascinated by the account
of her older brother Kamohoali'i, the shark god, leading her family of deities to the Hawaiian
islands. And, of course, growing up in Hawai'i and spending all of my free time in the ocean,
sharks, shark attacks, surfboards bitten in two by them-these were our equivalent of the 'things
that go bump in the night.' When I finally became inspired enough to sit down and begin the
writing of Shark Girls, it seemed natural to me to both combine what I had learned scientifically
about sharks (they are indeed fascinating animals, a lot more intelligent than people give them
credit), and the mythologies I grew up with-sprinkled in with a little Christian mysticism as well;
as far as I know there is no Hawaiian tale that involves a possible stigmata, or a “victim soul”!
Of course Scat recognizes the folly of this: a mythology that becomes its own mythology,
lumping together Hawaiian transformative shark tales with Christian miraculous-healing
accounts. Part of this is my own fascination, as previously indicated, with mythologies, but I
was also exploring a sort of spiritual desperation that seems especially prevalent in more
difficult, darker historical eras (and I believe we are in one of these periods now), when people
reach out to what is not fully understood with the hope that perhaps there is something out there
that can save them.
Perhaps the most challenging but ultimately a lot of fun aspect in the writing of this novel was
incorporating actual news accounts, biological facts from cited sources, along with quotes from
Hawaiian mythology telling the story of the shark-man or woman, the half shark, half human
form that some believe Willa (the fictitious victim in my story) has become. I wanted to offer
enough information and speculation to hint at the possibilities, but never confirm it one way or
the other because myth (indeed faith) doesn't work that way.
Some of Scat's back-story scenes about Hawai'i in the late 50s and 60s come straight from my
own memories. It was an amazing place to grow up, both because of its spectacular physical
beauty, along with its people. We were told we lived in a cultural “melting pot,” but I don't think
as a child I appreciated that, or even had a clue what it meant. As a Caucasian I was a minority;
there are more people of Asian descent than “haoles,” and there are more people of mixed race,
or “hapa-haoles” than any one single race. (The sad thing about this is there are very few pure
Hawaiians left; most of the people of Hawaiian background are in fact, hapa-haole.) The
language we spoke had a smattering of Hawaiian words, Japanese, Chinese, and of course most
people simply spoke Pidgin-English, or Hawaiian Creole as it is known now. We used
chopsticks as readily as a fork, and the snacks we craved as children were not candy, but Li hing
moi, shredded red ginger, manapua, sushi, poi, haupia. It was my task in Shark Girls to give a
sense of this unique world that Scat was born into and grew up in, while being mindful of the
time period-the 50s and 60s, and what this meant culturally and politically, both in Hawai'i and
on the mainland (as Hawai'i residents call the 'other' 49 states).
After college on the mainland I always expected to go back home, but I married a mainlander,
we had mainland jobs, children born on the mainland, and eventually, there was no getting
around it, a mainland home. For many years this was a great sadness, and a theme of
displacement is notable in Shark Girls and perhaps everything I have ever written. Then we
moved to Maine and I fell in love once again with a land and its people. I no longer live there,
but two of my books are set there, and it seemed a natural place for my character Gracie to also
gravitate to-and thus the dual setting of Shark Girls, to complement the parallel stories of two
women obsessed with Shark Girl, for different reasons. Ultimately though, Shark Girls is about
more than two women and two places. It explores what might be an essential 21st century
struggle: our often desperate attempts to create meaningful lives in an unpredictable world, and
the need to believe in the possibility of miracles in these increasingly dangerous times.
Bio – Jaimee Wriston Colbert
Jaimee Wriston Colbert is the author of a linked stories collection, Dream Lives of Butterflies,
that won the gold medal (first place) in the 2008 Independent Publishers Awards in the Short
Stories Fiction category, was a finalist in the USABookNews Best Books of 2007 Awards and
the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards, and made the Kansas City Star Top 100
Books of the Year list; a novel, Climbing the God Tree, winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Prize;
and the fiction collection Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile, winner of the Zephyr Publishing
Prize. A new novel, Shark Girls, is forthcoming from Livingston Press in November 2009. Her
stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including: TriQuarterly, Prairie
Schooner, Tampa Review, Connecticut Review, New Letters, Green Mountains Review, Snake
Nation Review, Louisiana Literature and broadcast on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” A story in
Isotope won the 2009 Editors’ Fiction Prize, and another story won the 2008 Jane’s Stories
National Short Story Award. She has had stories anthologized in Ohio Short Fiction, and
Peculiar Pilgrims – Stories From the Left Hand of God, and a story presented at the 2007 Boston
Fiction Festival, and performed throughout Maine by PCA Great Performances. Originally from
Hawaii, she is an Associate Professor of Creative at SUNY, Binghamton University.