5-star beginning and end, with a 2-star middle, Shark Heart really captivated me from the start, loving the outlandish premise (an alternate universe where there's a known rare disease of people turning into animal), and how it serves metaphorically as a visceral day-by-day experience of gradually losing a loved one to something beyond one's control. When it's at its imaginative high, Shark Heart's insightful storytelling and emotive writing style reminds me of Matt Haig and Fredrik Backman.

Divided into 3 parts (Part 1: 50%, Part 2: 35%, Part 3:15%), unfortunately Part 2 sticks out like an sore thumb in term of its content and style. Following a different character, not only does the story progresses like a Nicholas Sparks reject (disillusioned young love with all the tragic tropes one can imagine: uncaring parents, teenage pregnancy, domestic abuse, etc.), also absent is the surrealist tone, as it doesn't reference the human-to-animal condition until the very end. Overall this section feels like a throwaway tangent with the sole purpose being beefing up the book to a more marketable novel length.

Shark Heart reads like a proper debut, in the sense it is extremely uneven: Part 1 & 3 are delightfully immersive comparing to the overtly sentimental Part 2. Emily Habeck is still a promising author on my radar—fingers crossed her future work is more in the vein of imaginative humans story, and not sappy tragic romance.