Whalefall by Daniel Kraus
Jay Gardiner, a seventeen-year-old estranged from his family, dives into the Pacific Ocean to locate his father's remains, hoping to ease the guilt of his suicide. A giant squid and a hungry sperm whale unexpectedly jeopardize his mission, trapping him inside the whale's belly. With limited oxygen, Jay confronts his inner demons and struggles to escape the whale's stomach in the span of an hour.
This is a slow fizzle of a book, especially since the fateful dive itself doesn't feature until at least a third of the way into this book, the whole of which was padded with flashbacks to try and round out the story of why Jay is estranged from his family by his own choosing. Both the current moment and the flashbacks are told in third-person present tense and it really wore on me by the halfway point.
An author's decision to relinquish control of a narrative that should, by its own account, be full of tension and suspense, will never make sense to me. Seize the reins, people.
For the first half of the book, I was fairly drawn into the story, the setup is quite easy and the contentious relationship between father and son requires very little explanation. However, none of this was further developed or underscored by the subsequent chapters or pages. Every flashback only continued to emphasize the lack of character development and highlight how flat and two-dimensional Kraus has made Jay's family. There is a hint of complexity to the father that is (again) very easy to understand given that this has been done before — and will rightly be done over and over again. But the lack of another perspective both hurt the empathy I could muster for either Jay's or his father's behavior. You can see where this is going from a mile away and nothing interesting or multi-dimensional springs up from its shallow waters.
Honestly, this was something like if Steven Spielberg brought his known on-screen portrayals of daddy issues to a modern reimagining of Pinocchio.
Audiobook, as narrated by Kirby Heyborne: Heyborne was okay — I had to speed him up more than I normally like because between his slower, deliberate narration and the present tense added angst and false tension, I can't say his performance improved upon Kraus's text. Though I suppose neither did he hinder it.
