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A review by littlefreeinterrobang
Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck
5.0
A strange and ruminative story that was much more poetically written than I was anticipating. I aImost passed on it because I found the subtitle “A Love Story” to be a turn off — it had me expecting traditional romance, but anyone looking for that is likely to be disappointed. Thankfully, the allure of the weird overpowered my hesitation and I ended up being pleasantly surprised.
This book is unusual not only in concept but also in form. There’s the expected long-running prose, but there are also many pages that flow more as a collection of short vignettes, sometimes with only a paragraph or even a single sentence to a page. In other places, the narrative takes the structure of a script, while yet other sections take on footnotes or imagined but ultimately unwritten letters. Habeck’s playfulness with form adds another layer of strange that makes the book that much more captivatingly surreal.
The pacing of the story had me confused for a while, as the husband’s shark transformation seemed to be progressing far too quickly to fill up the remaining pages. The book does eventually shift tracks to a different (but still related) story, which I did find a little jarring. It took me a while to warm up to the new setting and characters, but the story still managed to carry me along.
Overall, a fresh reading experience and a pretty bold concept that could have easily been fumbled, but that the author manages to pull off.
This book is unusual not only in concept but also in form. There’s the expected long-running prose, but there are also many pages that flow more as a collection of short vignettes, sometimes with only a paragraph or even a single sentence to a page. In other places, the narrative takes the structure of a script, while yet other sections take on footnotes or imagined but ultimately unwritten letters. Habeck’s playfulness with form adds another layer of strange that makes the book that much more captivatingly surreal.
The pacing of the story had me confused for a while, as the husband’s shark transformation seemed to be progressing far too quickly to fill up the remaining pages. The book does eventually shift tracks to a different (but still related) story, which I did find a little jarring. It took me a while to warm up to the new setting and characters, but the story still managed to carry me along.
Overall, a fresh reading experience and a pretty bold concept that could have easily been fumbled, but that the author manages to pull off.