This was a really weird book. Parts read like poetry with sentence fragments and stream of consciousness. I skimmed most of the last quarter because it was just more of the same conversations over and and over again. I liked it over all but thought it didn't live up to the hype of all the 5 star reviews that I was seeing.

What a wonderful, thrilling story. I could feel what the protagonist was going through, like I was right there along with him. First time reading this author, but definitely won't be the last.

“The whale is a fellow mammal; its gaze has a simian weight. By acknowledging Jay, it shares that it has a soul.”

“Man versus ocean. It’s not a fair fight. It never was.”

Summary: Jay Gardiner has put on his scuba gear and returned to the ocean with one goal: to find his father’s remains…the father who taught him all he knows about scuba, the ocean, and its inhabitants. His training is still good, and his determination is sound, until a sperm whale in the midst of a feeding enters his path.

Oh man. As soon as I saw this, I just had to have the ARC, and I am so appreciative that @netgalley and @atria approved me. As someone with a relatively intense fear/discomfort about the ocean and small spaces, I immediately fell into it.

The story is told as Jay slowly loses PSI as he attempts what seems like an impossible escape: a way out of the belly of a whale. The atmosphere is claustrophobic and as Jay’s PSI slowly drops, chapter by chapter, I got more and more tense. Then the present is peppered with scenes from his past, his upbringing, and the training his father gave him.

Kraus did a phenomenal job detailing the panic, the close quarters, the entire atmosphere. What could sound at the surface as ridiculous or comical (“man swallowed by whale, very Pinocchio”) is anything but; Kraus clearly did his research to keep even this tale as scientifically plausible as possible, and that work shows.

A definite contender for my favorite of 2023 even though it’s only May. I already feel the urge to dive (heh) into a re-read.

5/5

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book started out so strong, and then it just fell apart for me and felt like an acid trip (not that I know what that feels like). HA!

I have had mixed luck with “Read Now” options, and I probably would not have picked this one up if I had not noticed a comment in a Facebook reading group from a trusted recommendation source that she was reading it. That cover is almost irresistible. This book surprised me in so many ways. I had trouble putting this down. I loved the way the author wove factoids about sealife into the narrative. I found myself Googling images and information as I read - one of my favorite sorts of reading experiences. The “inner journey” aspect - the father/son relationship - gave the novel so much more depth (pun unintended), and what I thought would be a largely forgettable survival thriller ended up being one of my favorite books of the year so far. I also really appreciated the author’s note at the end. Thank you so much for this advanced copy - I’m so glad I read it!

What I thought was going to be a book about surviving after being swallowed by a whale, and it is, turned out to be so much more! I was sobbing at the end! Don’t get me wrong this is pretty scary and claustrophobic, horrific and gross. But it also has so much heart. At the core this is a story about a father and sons relationship and grief. The metaphors and just the writing in general was so wonderful! It was beautiful and heart pounding. I don’t want to give any spoilers. I thoroughly enjoyed this and I highly recommend it! Thank you so much NetGalley for the eARC.

The cover both creeped me out and make me want to find out more. This was a fascinating and engaging storyline with depth and unsettled uncertainty and vivid storytelling.

Don't doubt the hype on WHALEFALL by @DanielDKraus! Action, thriller, and a bit speculative. A grieving son swallowed by a whale and a clicking clock on his survival. It's even crazier and better than it sounds. This one deserves all the awards it's going to get.

Credibly researched, Krause takes a ludicrous situation and delivers the tensest read of the Year. The father and son relationship is portrayed beautifully in all its ugly complexities. Might be my favorite read of the year.

Whalefall is a wholly unexpected observation on the complexities of the parent and child relationship. Mitt Gardiner is an expert diver and ocean conservationist of the extreme order. Someone who almost loathes living on land. Diving is his everything. It’s a passion he intends to share with his only son, Jay, whether he enjoys it or not. Jay’s perspective straddles a blurred line between apt pupil, dutiful son, and resentful child/teen.

Mitt teaches Jay everything he knows. He means to make his son capable and safe in the ocean and maybe also in life. He is harder on his son than on his daughters in all the ways that parents can be; setting higher goals and expectations for the only male child. In a way, Jay feels like Mitt’s legacy, but not all children want to be that. There’s a key line in the book about fathers having obligations, to which Mitt retorts, don’t sons have obligations, too?

Jay leaves home at fifteen, following news that his father has terminal cancer (mesothelioma). He intends to prove to Mitt that he’s his own man who can make it in the world unaided (though he always has arm’s-length support from his parents). Independent and spirited to a fault, Jay moves from place to place until he ultimately settles in with another family that is no blood relation.

Meanwhile, his own family suffers through Mitt’s disease without Jay. It isn’t until after Mitt commits suicide, returning himself to the ocean that is all he’s ever wanted to surround himself with, that Jay gains perspective on the importance of his father’s lessons and of belonging to a family. He decides that he can overcome the resultant chasm between his self and his mother and sisters if only he can dive one last time and recover something of Mitt for them to bury; a sort of closure that the family did not get from having no mortal remains to inter. Jay’s return to the ocean after two years puts to the test every bit of knowledge Mitt has ever imparted and through his journey into the mouth of a sperm whale, Jay finds acceptance, understanding, and a deep longing for life.

Beautifully written and technically graceful, Whalefall is art of the highest order. The author seams the past and present together beautifully and tells a resonating story through a scientific lens. Highly recommended, this one is a contender for novel of the year.

Thank you to NetGalley and the author for an Advance Reader Copy.

I want more, what a read! I saw people raving about this book on an online group. I thought no way can a book be this good, did not fall for the hype. But I was curious, and read it. This book, will stay with you for a long time.
As weird as this sounds, a boy is swallowed by a whale and has to get it. Sounds rather silly, but this book is packed with emotions, love, hate, misconceptions, and forgiving. I felt like I was in the belly of that whale.

5 ⭐️

This was an incredible read. This book had so much depth and emotions that I never was expecting. It's a story of forgiveness, acceptance, and grief.

Jay is a 17 year old boy that has recently lost his father. Their relationship was always strained but at the end it had boiled over. There is many big feelings and guilt after his father died in the ocean and his body never found. Jay is determined to do one last dive to find his fathers bones.

He is driving alone and conditions are not great but he is moving along ok. When he spots a giant squid and is mesmerized by it, but then he gets caught in the middle of a sperm whale that has come up to eat the squid and is mistakenly swallowed with it.

This book is incredibly claustrophobic and stressful. The descriptions of being inside the whale caused me so much dread but I loved every minute: I also loved the internal dialogue Jay was having.

Although over 300 pages, the chapters are incredibly short and there are some pages with one or two sentences of text. It's read incredibly far finishing in one day.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria MTV books for this advanced reader copy. My review is voluntarily my own.

I will be posting my review to my Instagram page the.floofs.booknook and retail sites close or on publication.

So good! It took me a bit to get through this. Not because of the book, but because it’s May and I’m a teacher. To that end, I really appreciated and enjoyed the short chapters. What a powerful story! Yes, he gets swallowed by a whale. Yes, he has to fight to survive. But I was also touched by the relationship with his father. The reality that our parents are human and can’t always be what we think we need, and vice versa as children we don’t necessarily follow the paths they hoped and dreamed for us. But maybe we can still be ok with that. Maybe we can still find a way together.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

The sea has always frightened me in that nobody knows what’s down there. Less than 5% of creatures in the deep oceans have been discovered. There could be a whole Snorks city and we’d never know! I learned so much about the ocean and marine biology by reading this book, like the sperm whale’s echolocation clicks are the loudest sound made by an animal (that we know of - again, what is down there?!), and that they have four stomachs.

Jay is a 17-year-old boy who recently lost his Dad, Mitt, to mesothelioma and suicide. Mitt spent much of his life in the water, so when he saw the end coming, he weighted himself down and did a whalefall into the ocean. The father and son didn’t have the best relationship, and diving was about the only activity they did together. Jay was Mitt’s only boy, but he is small in stature and sensitive, leading to a lot of ridicule from his father. When Mitt was dying, he begged the family to make Jay come visit him, but Jay refused.

Some time later, Jay finds himself at Monastery Beach, a place in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. Most people don’t dive there, as there is a canyon as deep as The Grand Canyon under the surface, and it’s easy to lose your way. Jay wants to find his dad’s bones, but can’t dive down into the canyon because he only has oxygen. You need specialized equipment to keep you from getting nitrogen narcosis, a deadly disease that causes confusion and hallucinations in divers.

Jay is confident that he can find bones before he reaches the edge of the underwater canyon. His father taught him everything about oceanography and deep-sea diving, and Jay’s need to find something permanent of him, even if only a tooth, makes him take the dangerous gamble. As he’s mesmerized by a rare type of bioluminescent squid, something bumps into him. That something happens to be a sperm whale.

At first, Jay isn’t worried. People don’t get eaten by whales … unless the person is very thin, and unless it’s a sperm whale. The only whale with the ability to pass a human down its esophagus happens to be trying to get to that 30-foot long squid, and when the whale begins to suck, the squid grabs onto Jay and he’s along for the ride - right into the creature’s first stomach. For the rest of the book, we look back on the relationship between Jay and his father, as Jay tries to figure out how to survive his situation.

I haven’t read writing like this since Erika Ferencik’s “Girl In Ice”. The visuals seemed like you are RIGHT THERE in the stomach with Jay, and it was both beautiful and barbaric. The author wanted to make this as scientifically accurate as possible, and it made for a fascinating book. The entire story is good, but the mental pictures it gives are breathtaking. As with “Girl In Ice”, this is one of the most thoughtful, stunning horror/thriller books I’ve ever read. It gets nothing less than five stars!

(Thank you to MTV/Atria Books, Daniel Kraus, and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my review. This book is slated to be released on August 8, 2023.)

I don’t even know how to describe my feelings about this book except to say I think everyone should give it a shot. One of my new favorites.

Whalefall is sure to be the hit of the year! Yes, It’s claustrophobic and anxiety inducing, but also heartbreaking and has so much emotion and heart in it. You can tell the author did his research down to every last detail to make sure this is a story that you will remember. I was blown away by how believable this work of fiction is, and I swear I could visualize everything the main character was going through. I would gladly recommend this to most of my friends!

I’ve been struggling for almost a week now to find a way to word this. To express how this book made me feel, in a way that will be totally understandable to another reader. I’ve realized I can’t. I cannot put into words what this did to my heart, and how it’s living in my soul right now.

All that said, I’ll try to tell you how it’s made me feel, and why I know you need to read this book.

Whalefall is gripping, emotional, heart wrenching. There has never been a story more likely to pull your heart through your chest, and grip it until it’s ready to burst. It’s a full spectrum of emotions, each sitting on your chest and watching you from its perch, seeing the destruction it causes in real time.

In all my life, I’ve never read a book and thought to myself, this is it. This is the book that will become required reading in school, dissected and discussed in depth by people around the world. This is it, this is that book I didn’t think existed.

If you too, need to experience all this, read this. Maybe you don’t know you need to experience it? Read it anyways. Let it settle in and show you the kind of person you are, and maybe the kind of person you want to be.

What a story! It’s like nothing I’ve read before. A fantastic, epic journey of hope, family, purpose, adventure, and new beginnings. The story grips you from the beginning and pulls you into the environment immediately. You are present IN the story. Highly recommended. Trigger warnings for suicide.

I don't think 5 stars is enough to rate this novel. Daniel Kraus has hit it out of the park. Gripping, heartbreaking, terrifying, and resilient. I don't want to provide any spoilers, but, the relationship between Jay and his father, Mitt, take on a whole new dimension and it will tug at your heartstrings. Thank you NetGalley, for allowing me to read this early, because with all the hype behind it, I could not wait. Trust me, though, the wait will be worth it. This novel does not disappoint at all. This story will have you on the edge of your seat from beginning to end.

Daniel Kraus has a magical ability to lose himself in the fabric of whatever book he writes, a gift that allows him to pen everything from Bent Heavens to The Ghost That Ate Us on his own, to collaborations with the likes of Guillermo del Toro and George Romero. A unique voice created to fit the story at hand, and Whalefall is no exception.
From page one, the writing is urgent yet informative. It moves at a pace so breakneck, yet fleshes out characters and backstory that the reader may not even realize it takes a hundred pages for Jay to be swallowed by the whale. The attempted escapes are the racing adrenaline of the story, but the flashbacks to Jay's relationship with his whole family, but mainly his father are the massive beating heart. The two coincide to form a more believable and authentic version of Slumdog Millionaire.
The research and understanding Kraus injects in such an organic way, goes a long way to ground the book, but also ensure that in over 300 pages there is nothing resembling a dull moment.
Perhaps Kraus's greatest achievement is developing the themes and setting up the story in such a way that with the end in sight, the reader has no earthly idea whether Jay will survive, and Kraus has crafted a story where either outcome would have been surprising, yet inevitable.
Whalefall is a brilliant idea, executed to absolute perfection and a contender for book of the year.

2.5 stars

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Where to start? I wanted to like this book very badly. Whalefall as a scientific phenomenon is fascinating. I enjoy nonfiction about divers. I followed the story of the lobster fisherman who ended up in a whale's mouth. So why didn't this book grab me?

We're introduced to Jay and his father, a washed-up seadog, and their tumultuous relationship. Jay's father has recently committed suicide by drowning and Jay is taking it upon himself to try to recover his dad's bones. Jay's guilt is immense - he declined to see his father in the last year or so of his life, despite knowing he had cancer.

The book vignettes quickly between past and present. The prose is similarly choppy. It's almost disorienting, which I'm sure was the intent, but it made it difficult to connect with Jay or his father. Their relationship is the crux of the book, despite the whole "being swallowed by a whale" story. It's weird, it's disjointed, Jay doesn't quite understand it himself, and ultimately the attempt at redeeming the father fell flat for me. Jay says at one point that he is the child and the onus of responsibility to be better is on his father, and I agree. But the book turns it around to "don't sons have responsibilities too?"

I mean...sure. What we owe to each other in our lifetime is a complex topic. But the abuse Jay suffers completely warrants the distance he places between himself and his father. I found myself disliking his mother and sisters, too, for always trying to make him reconnect. I deeply wish Jay would go to therapy and I wish that his mother and sisters would listen to their therapists who I should hope are telling them that the guilt they heaped on Jay about his dad was a shit thing to do.

The whale parts were appropriately tense, scary, gory, and horrific, although I do admittedly find it stretched my suspension of disbelief to its limit that Jay survives after how grievous his injuries are. Lots and lots of injury descriptions in this book, so reader beware (acid burns, throat slitting, other abrasions/gashes, pressure injuries, eardrum popping, graphic eye descriptions, vomit, aspiration, drowning, the bends)