“Jay Gardiner has given himself a fool’s errand—to find the remains of his deceased father in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Monastery Beach. He knows it’s a long shot, but Jay feels it’s the only way for him to lift the weight of guilt he has carried since his dad’s death by suicide the previous year.

The dive begins well enough, but the sudden appearance of a giant squid puts Jay in very real jeopardy, made infinitely worse by the arrival of a sperm whale looking to feed. Suddenly, Jay is caught in the squid’s tentacles and drawn into the whale’s mouth where he is pulled into the first of its four stomachs. He quickly realizes he has only one hour before his oxygen tanks run out—one hour to defeat his demons and escape the belly of a whale.”

Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone novel. I got a copy of this on ebook through NetGalley to review.

Thoughts: This was a quick and unique read, but I wasn’t a huge fan of it. I liked the beginning of it and the way we jump from past to present. I thought the visceral gory descriptions inside the whale got a to be a bit much and just too long.

The story follows Jay, a very smart seventeen year-old with a bright future who has huge daddy issues. Jay makes a strange decision to do a dangerous deep sea dive in order to recover his father’s bones. His father committed suicide in the end stages of cancer and Jay has decided that if he can bring his father’s bones home people will finally respect him. Jay’s dad was pretty much an ass to Jay growing up but was hugely respected by the town for various seafaring heroics.

When Jay moved out and didn’t come back when his father was in the end stage of cancer, the rest of Jay’s family and the town decided Jay was awful and is determined to take it out on Jay daily. Jay thinks this dive is the answer. Jay gets into trouble when he sees a giant squid and then gets swallowed by a sperm whale during his ill-thought-out dive. Now Jay has to reevaluate his whole life up to this point and take advice from the whale (who talks in his father’s voice) in order to attempt to survive the ordeal.

There were some things I liked about this. You learn a lot about diving and I liked the format that jumped from the present to the past. Basically, when Jay is in the whale he has a lot of time to think and certain things that happen make him have flashbacks to moments with his dad and family. The whale starts to speak to him in the voice of his father and he starts to come to peace with the relationship him and his father had.

There was also a lot I didn’t like about this book. There is way too much page space given to Jay grimly crawling through the stomach, tissue, etc of the whale and all the gory and gruesome descriptions that go along with doing that. Really, I get it, it’s gross…I have a pretty good imagination and I didn’t need to hear those details rehashed over and over again. Also, Jay revisits a lot of the same tortuous thoughts over and over again and it gets wordy and repetitive. By the end of the book I was skimming through these long paragraphs just to see if something would actually happen at some point.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Kraus’s writing style in general it was just too wordy for me. I felt like this could have been a much shorter story and had the same impact. I also had a lot of issues relating to Jay and his half-baked decisions given how incredibly successful and intelligent he was supposed to be. I think the moral was that common sense doesn’t apply to family relationships but well, I disagree. There is also a kind of theme of humanity destroying the earth which felt forced. In the end this felt like a neat idea that was drawn out too long and written in a very sensationalized way.

My Summary (3/5): Overall I wasn’t a huge fan of this book. I did like some elements of it; learning about diving was fun and the format of jumping from the present to a slowly revealed past was well done. I just felt like the whole thing was too wordy and repetitive. The reader is beat over the head again and again about descriptions of the interior of the whale and we get to hear Jay’s tortured thoughts about his father again and again as well. I would hope most of us can work through our family issues without getting swallowed by a whale, but I guess that is what it took for Jay to figure things out. Not a fan of the writing style in general, it just wasn’t for me

Early Review – Whalefall by Daniel Kraus (3/5 stars)

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