Girl at Sea

Felt like taking a break from my other reads to tackle Maureen Johnson's Girl at Sea. This one's underwater archaeology demanded it be tackled before 13 Little Blue Envelopes. 

Clio has an interesting life. When she was 12, she and her dad invented a board game that was turned into a real thing and into a video game. They made a ton of money but it was stolen by her dad's business partner. Shortly after, her dad took her diving with him (she's had a lot of dive training) and she ended up getting hit by a boat, leaving a big scar down her arm. Not long after in Tokyo, a famous manga artist drew a zipper over the scar and her dad let her get it tattooed on her. That bit of irresponsibility was the final straw that led to her parents' divorce.

Clio is now 17 and has just gotten a summer job at the art store she and her mom frequent. Her mom seems to do restoration work for big time, museum-level art. Clio wants to work there for the discount, but also because her crush works there. She's never been kissed and is determined for it to happen. Apparently, her best friend (a girl named Jackson who never once appears in the story) gets kissed a lot and Clio knows it is her time. 

So when her mom has to go to Kansas to do surprise restoration work in connection with getting a grant or something she never thought she'd get, Clio is very unhappy to learn that instead of doing her new art job and getting kissed by her crush, she's going to Italy with her dad. 

I want to like Clio's dad but every problem in this book would have been solved by him treating her like an adult. 

They're all going on some expedition by boat off the coast of Italy. The cast is:

1) Clio

2) Her dad, who bought the boat really cheap from a divorced woman wanting to stick it to her ex. 

3) Julia, an English archaeologist and surprise, her dad's girlfriend.

4) Julia's daughter, Elsa, who is half-English, half-Swedish and looks like a curvy "cheese goddess." Elsa is suffering from a breakup and is determined to hook up with...

5) Aidan, Julia's assistant, who is the expedition's tech guy. 

6) Martin, Clio's dad's old friend who's basically going along to keep her dad in line. 

The first problem is that her dad didn't say a word about Julia. Clio finds out by seeing him kiss her ear on the teeny tiny plane they take between Italian cities. Yeah, I'd be grossed out, too. 

But the bigger problem is that her dad basically forces her to work on the ship as its cook a) without telling her first and b) without telling her what they're doing. She's forced to do all the cooking AND cleanup by herself (because everyone else just ditches) and no one will tell her anything. Elsa doesn't know either but she's not being forced to work. She's a linguist so she just serves as their translator when it's needed.

As you can imagine, Clio is not pleased. She also realizes she didn't make it clear when she said goodbye to her crush that she would at some point be back, so she's obsessed with emailing or calling him to clarify. But her dad won't even let her call her mom. He says he did it and that's that. She's not allowed to have access to the outside world, which makes no sense, because she's not been told anything that she could give away.

All in all, her dad means well but he's a total dumbfuck and causes all these problems himself. Clio does a bunch of reckless stuff. She and Aidan bicker all the time because of course they like each other. Elsa gets mad about this because he did kiss her first. Martin is having heart problems and Clio's sleuthing finally gets her in the know, so she's able to go on the major dive with her dad. 

There are a few flashback sections to an old archaeological mystery that's really pretty cool, and they end up finding what's basically a Rosetta Stone but for an older language than Egyptian. 

Then the boat gets hijacked and Aidan and Clio have to save themselves AND the stone and float around in the ocean for hours until they're rescued. 

It's really a very wild book. The archaeological stuff is out there. The action movie stuff is out there. The rest is typical YA family and romance drama but combined with the first two elements, it gets crazy. 

I didn't hate it at all, but it did frustrate me that so much time was spent hiding the mission from Clio when she could have been included from the beginning, and more time could have been spent discussing the history, the significance and the search. It's got good bones and it's different but it's not exactly perfect.