Bingo Square: Rec’d (Colormeloverly raved about this novel repeatedly last year on IG)
Definitely not my usual kind of novel nowadays – I don’t venture into literary fiction all too often anymore but if they were all like this, I might.
Shortly after their wedding, Lewis notices some odd changes in his body, and after consultation, he is diagnosed with an animal mutation: he is transforming into a great white shark, and has less than a year before his transformation will be complete and he has to be released to the wild.
Wren, his wife, has always been the stable one, the reliable and grounded one, while Lewis was the failed actor turned high school theater teacher. Wren, after a tumultuous childhood, whose details are only hinted at, wanted security in her life, working hard, choosing a finance career and, in general, dreaming of a medium life. They were great balance and pairing for each other, and now Wren is thrust into the caregiver position.
I don’t want to share too many details because even knowing the basic premise of “man turns into shark,” I was unaware of a lot of the details, and enjoyed having everything revealed as I went.
About halfway through, there is a shift in the perspective of the story, and it puts some of the context into a slightly different perspective, adding parallels and creating even more emotional layers.
Naturally, the reader can view Lewis’s literal turning into a shark as a metaphor for a variety of things, whether mental health, cancer or simply a way to portray people changing in manners that force them apart but beyond that, I also just quite liked the portrayal of a marriage and relationship we saw between him and Wren. While the novel has its movements filled with loss and sadness, there is also something quite sweet.
It’s also a very quick read – many chapters are less than a page, and with Lewis’s desire to write a play, the novel also plays with structure, including scenes and pages taken from a play, other times the writing is a bit poetic, all short lines – it’s still primarily prose and very accessible if anyone of those things sounded challenging or off-putting.