Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books
Publication Date: 3rd August 2023
This book centres around a husband and wife, Lewis and Wren and Lewis is turning into a great white shark…….yes you read that correctly!
Allow me to explain, Shark Heart by Emily Habeck tells the story of Wren and Lewis, a young couple enjoying a very happy marriage and life. Wren is very successful in the world of finance and Lewis is teaching drama at a high school. Both enjoy their vocations and revel in their differences, Wren being the pragmatic, practical organised and grounded one, Lewis being the artistic, creative and freer living one.
Lewis starts to experience some odd symptoms, his nose cartilage starts to dissolve and he can push his nose flat against his face, he has extreme thirst he cannot quench and odd rough skin on his feet and lower back. He has some tests and is told he has carcharodon carcharias which is an animal mutation turning him into a great white shark, which is apparently one of the rarest mutations.
As Lewis’s symptoms intensify and he’s told he has a year at best before he’s a full shark in need of release into the ocean, Wren and Lewis try to come to terms with letting go. Wren has to watch her husband disappear piece by piece and Lewis has to confront wanting to stay with Wren but fighting the urge for the ocean where he can breathe freely.
In the second half of the book we meet Wren’s mother Angela as a young girl in the run up to falling pregnant with Wren and the early days of Wren’s childhood. Angela suffers domestic abuse in her pregnancy at the hands of Wren’s father and has to struggle through as mostly a single parent with help from her friends Julia and Julia’s brother George.
What I loved about this book (and I did absolutely LOVE it) was the links between illnesses that we know (I’m thinking cancer and altzheimers) and the way family members have to watch their loved ones change and slip away from them. I don’t know if the author was aiming for this but this is what I felt when reading it. It really broke my heart in places and gave me real pause to think about losing people we love and having to reconcile who they are and what their bodies and minds are turning into with the person they once were.
I didn’t know where the second part of the book was going at first and was surprised to find we were now following Wren’s mother. It was a very interesting thread which allowed me to better understand Wren and the person she turned out to be.
The final section of the book sees us back with Lewis and Wren but separately navigating their new lives. The last few chapters are beautiful and poignant and come together to form a really satisfying, heartwarming and hopeful ending.
One of the other elements of the book that I really enjoyed was the way Emily Habeck played with form. Some sections are prose like, interspersed with scripts portraying some chapters as scenes in a play detailing dialogue and stage instructions, alluding to Lewis’s acting life. There are also lists and a brilliant use of repetition. The chapters are short and snappy, some being just a couple of sentences on a page. Short chapters are a particular favourite of mine as I find them propulsive and they allow me read a book quickly without getting too bogged down in long and lyrical chapters which sometimes lose my interest.
I read this book over a two day period and would have loved in an ideal world to sit down and devour it in 24 hours but unfortunately work and family get in the way! (Joking….probably).
Shark Heart is a beautiful and unique love story, all forms of love being included be that familial or romantic. It’s a book to make you stop and think about the people you love and what you would do without them. It deals with loss, motherhood, love, grief, dreams and hopes and I absolutely loved it.
Thank you so much to Ella Patel and Jo Fletcher books for my beautiful copy (that cover is stunning!).
See you all soon.
Amanda – Bookishchat
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