Book notes: Whalefall

By Daniel Kraus.

Recommended by the New York Times best thrillers of 2023 by Sarah Lyall list, her review here. A fun thriller indeed! I’d recommend it as well.

Scoring:

• Axe for the frozen sea: 9/10.
• Effective page count: 318 actual pages, but felt like ~200. (Nice!)

Jay Gardiner, 17 years old, had a tumultuous relationship with his father. His father was big and strong, had a larger-than-life personality, and beloved by everyone in the family and community. His only son, Jay was none of these things, which is a source of frustration for them both. Jay runs away at age 15, his father is diagnosed with cancer during that time and dies, the family and community can’t forgive Jay for not being there. Jay sets out to scuba dive to find his father’s remains in the ocean to win back the respect of his family and community, and has a fantastic adventure involving a whale.

Besides being a compelling story in it’s own right, the book used 2 other tricks to help with the thrill of the ride. The first was white space: most chapters were only 1-2 pages, and in gripping moments some chapters only had one sentence, which added to the excitement as you frantically flip pages. Second the use of the chapter name: Chapters that flashed back in time used a year for a name, (e.g. “2015”), whereas chapters in the current moment were named by the amount of air in the tank (e.g. “2795 PSI”).

The whale was a metaphor for Jay’s dad, which is very obvious but still such an interesting way to tell the tale of their relationship.

In the acknowledgements section at the end the author talks about how he came up with the concept for the story and the research he did. We don’t know of a case where a whale has eaten a human, but “sperm whales are mysterious enough to lend me a degree of artistic license.”