Shark Heart by Emily Habeck

Human to Animal Mutations?

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*****

This is a wonderful, thought-provoking, five-star book. It’s the kind of book where every other line is beautiful and meaningful and if you are one to highlight books, almost every page will be colorful. BUT, it is also a very weird book.

It is a love story between Lewis and Wren. They have only been married for a few weeks when Lewis is diagnosed with a carcharodon carcharias mutation. This means he is transforming into a great white shark.

Human to animal mutations are a very real fate in this book. They are stand-ins for the very real fates in our world like metastatic cancer and mental illness. Lewis’s mutation is an aggressive one, and he will be a shark within a year.

The author gives glimpses of other mutations as well. For instance, Wren goes to a support group meeting and meets a woman whose brother is becoming a zebra. At the gym’s swimming pool, she meets a woman who is pregnant with peregrine falcons.

By the way, this swimmer, Tiny Pregnant Woman, was one of my favorite characters. Of this friendship, the author tells us: “Wren and the Tiny Pregnant Woman shared practical, applied interests like oncoming personal devastation, terrifying sadness, and the experience of free-falling into grief and the unknown.”

Astute and heartbreaking, right?

And this is what the author says the last time the women are together: “With no large fanfare, this interaction concluded Wren and the Tiny Pregnant Woman’s unusual friendship. They each served a purpose in the other’s life, and separately, each had enough to grieve without grieving each other as well.”

Stay tuned for more terrific quotes from the book, but before sharing them, let me talk about the book’s structure, which is also unusual. Lewis was an aspiring actor who did not make it on Broadway but who was a magnificent theater teacher at a high school. Thus, in the book, traditional scenes are interspersed with fragments of conversation written as play dialogue and stage direction.

Also, there are four main parts to the book:

• Part One: Wren and Lewis
• Part Two: Angela (this is Wren’s mother, so this is Wren’s back story)
• Part Three: Lewis Woodard and Margaret C. Finnegan (Margaret is someone Lewis meets when he is a shark, so this is his future story)
• Epilogue

I loved Part One the most, and kind of wish all four parts had somehow been melded together without the stop and then start again nature the book currently has. BUT, I loved the book so much, I was just glad to learn more about the characters.

Another personal note is that I am old enough to remember the early 1970s when having cancer pretty much turned the patient into a social pariah. Thus, I had the perfect mindset for human to animal mutations.

Enough of my chatter. Let me share some of the many meaningful quotes from the author so you will see what I mean about heavily highlighting this book:

• As a grown man comfortable with his own vulnerability, he inspired his students to enter an uncommon domain, a place where fear, sadness, and rage were worthwhile experiences rather than things to smile through or tuck away.
• Lewis had taken procrastination to its limit. Later was no longer a dependable place…The best he had to offer anything was right now. And maybe that had always been true…Mortality made him a realist. Mortality focused his priorities.
• It was not really a dancing song but, rather, the kind of music that made you want to nestle into the arms of someone wonderful and stay there forever. Through the music’s swells, they swayed, and knew, and they held each other, and they knew, and they melted, and they knew, and they knew, and they knew: Everything would be different and difficult soon.
• Beyond pity, grief, and secret fascination, almost everyone at the party discovered the same private truth: Lewis and Wren’s situation made them feel better about themselves. Afterward, as those in attendance sifted through their own junk drawer of troubles, they would thank the tilted universe it wasn’t their change to bear; their blood and bones ripping away from humanity’s known, narrow lane; their life and family broken and rearranged.
• His friends stopped texting and calling. His own mother couldn’t look at him without crying. His father stood six feet away even though Lewis’s condition was not contagious. Wren was the only person left who still approached Lewis as he once was.
• In their innocence, they failed to grasp the labor of losing a partner, how the tasks of simple existence would become logistical feats and one person’s burden.

This last quote from the novel sums it up completely: It’s a love story about forging ahead while facing great and immediate change.

I end where I started: This is a wonderful, thought-provoking, five-star book. I recommend it highly.

*****

Click here to learn more about Shark Heart.

*****

If you like my writing, I hope you will check out my new book, Chai on Life. “Chai” is a mystical word in Hebrew. It is pronounced “high” making this book High on Life with a Jewish slant. It is available wherever books are sold including Amazon.