Shark Heart

Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck is a weird-ass book raved about by the woman leading the weird-ass poetry workshop I took at the Sandwich Library in February. I actually participated in three free workshops offered, and the poetry was my least favorite for many reasons. Unforgivably, the teacher was totally unprepared. And yet I did heed this book recommendation from her.

As so often happens with weird-ass books I read, I kind of like it, but it needs some tweaking/editing. It is a quick and easy read so that’s nice.  I originally rated it harshly, 3-stars on Goodreads, but after reviewing my highlights and writing this summary, I would change it to 4-stars.

The idea is a good one, creative and original, but the orchestration of all the pieces misses the mark for me. The structural elements, choppy chapters, and awkward transitions between viewpoints distracted me from the profound declarations, such as this one.

“Joy and grief are human birthrights, but mostly, being alive is everything in between.”

And this one.

“Truth and Love were complicated concepts on their own, and patching the two words together created a significant tangle Lewis could not unwind.”

The setting is an otherwise realistic world where it appears normal for some humans to contract an ailment that causes them to transform into animals. The main character named Wren, who is not a bird but a woman, reflects on how her life has been impacted by these transformations. The story begins as her husband is diagnosed with a Carcharodon carcharias mutation. Thus, begins the couple's misadventures as he gradually transitions into a great white shark. While the physical changes and adaptations he endures are shocking, his psychological journey proves to be the most unsettling. 

The characters and even their animal counterparts, impart a great deal of wisdom as they are forced to reckon with their unusual circumstances in this book. Their interactions are all a bit poetic and metaphoric. Maybe in its own weird-ass way reading this helped me connect to my own inner love of figurative language.

Maybe life has no ceiling, no floors, no walls, and we’re free-falling from the moment we’re born, lying to each other, agreeing to make invented ideas important, to numb ourselves from the secret.” “What’s the secret?” “Maybe what happens between birth and death isn’t as precious as we think.”