Whalefall by Daniel Kraus
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The cover of the book tells you all you need to know: a fictional diver gets swallowed by a sperm whale. The writer somehow got a publisher to accept a 300-page [more on that in a bit] book about it. I originally requested the audiobook from the library, but that was taking a while to come in, so I then requested the print book. Both came in at the same time. I started listening to the audiobook, but gave up on that because the reader had a wimpy teen-like voice. To be fair, the book’s narrator is a wimpy teen.
So how do you make an entire book about being swallowed by a whale? You don’t; and the author didn’t. There are many pages with a single word on them, others with just one short sentence. That’s why the 300 pages is misleading, presumably stretched with mucho white space for commercial purposes. Much of the “dialogue” consists of whale noises. The whole concept is preposterous and the writing pedestrian at best. If I had any other book to read, I wouldn’t have finished this, but with plenty of skimming, it was easy to complete in a few hours, although I did spread those out over a few days since I still didn’t have another book in at the library. Since I did at least read to the end, I’ll give it two stars, but I don’t recommend this to anyone.