SHARK HEART

A young couple’s happy marriage shatters when the husband turns into a great white shark.

Lewis and Wren prove the maxim that opposites attract. Wren is practical and solution-oriented; she works in finance and is the couple’s breadwinner. Idealistic dreamer Lewis tried to make it as an actor in New York and has now returned home to Texas to teach high school theater. But Lewis begins to develop worrying symptoms: insatiable thirst, extra teeth, a hunger for fish. It’s a rare condition but not unheard of: the Carcharodon carcharias mutation. Lewis is turning into the largest predatory fish on Earth—the great white shark. As Lewis loses more of his human life and Wren tries to figure out how to say goodbye to the world they’ve built together, she’s also reminded of her childhood, when her senses of safety and stability were destroyed as her single mother’s own tragic fate played out. For much of the book, Wren’s role maps movingly onto real-world narratives of caretaking ill spouses or parents, though this map becomes less exact as the book unfolds. This unfolding, though, is more playful than one might expect: fragments of poetry, play script, and even footnotes are woven into the brief—occasionally a single sentence—vignettes from the lives of Lewis, Wren, and Wren’s mother, the book’s primary perspectives. The result is a bit Shakespeare, a bit Kafka, and a bit Disney, with Habeck unafraid of sentiment, big proclamations, and talking animals. (“Are we all just actors performing some unbound art form for God, the audience of space?” Lewis wonders.) Habeck’s heart-on-sleeve approach to relationships, grief, and natural wonder may strike some as saccharine, but readers looking for an earnest exploration of love will be satisfied.

Though occasionally florid, a debut that stands out from the pack—er, school.