Shark Heart
Have you ever asked your significant other a question along the lines of “would you still love me if ___?” Well, you are in luck! Emily Habeck takes that premise and gives us a love story where a man is becoming a shark! What happens when those who we vow to love are nothing but a memory, a shadow of who they were? Do our feelings flee or do we hold them tighter? Lewis and Wren are soulmates who have just gotten married when a diagnosis changes their plans and Wren becomes his caretaker. Broken up by sections, we later on learn this is not the first time Wren has dealt with the transformation of a loved one and how her experiences as a child taking care of her mother impacted her. We also get a snapshot of Wren’s mother’s childhood as she falls in love with a man.
The story is an exploration of the old refrain “in health and in sickness,” as Wren and Lewis remain deeply committed to each other. Once Lewis is fully a shark, he tries his best to remember Wren, while Wren aimlessly travels back home where a new kind of love grows inside of her. This book is part poem, part screenplay and altogether a beautiful book that touches the deepest part of your soul.
I think constantly about this book. A book that demands to be felt. Some of the quotes that really put this book as my favorite book of 2024 are:
“Will you let me stand beside you on your plot of earth? We’ll tell the weeds to grow tall around our ankles, and when the wind gives us sycamore seeds, we’ll raise them as sprouts, seedlings, saplings, until they overpower, shade and nurture us. Our Trees will grow for two hundred years or more as our union becomes more unquestionable and strong.”
“Wren saw now how passion was delicate and temporary, a visitor, a feeling that would come and go. Feelings fled under pressure; feelings did not light the darkness. What remained strong in the deep, the hard times, was love as an effort, a doing, a conscious act of will. Soulmates, like her and Lewis, were not theoretical and found. They were tangible, built.”
Oh, so good. I tear up thinking about their journeys as individuals and the joy of finding someone you love and the potential pain of losing them.
The best books awaken emotions in you and this book does a wonderful job of touching every human emotion on the spectrum, all this in a story where a man turns into a shark and a woman ends up pregnant with birds. Magic realism as a genre has never had a more perfect use in contemporary literature.