I was so hyped for this one! I have loved some past books from Alexis Hall so I was ALL the excitement for Moby Dick in space. But then something did not click. Keep reading this book review of Hell’s Heart for my full thoughts.
Summary
Earth is a ruin, and the scattered remnants of humanity scavenge what they can from the stars under the watchful auspices of a grab-bag of collectives, corporations, and churches which are all that remains of what we once called society. Having long exhausted any conventional sources of energy, life in the solar system is now sustained by a volatile, hallucinogenic substance called spermaceti, which is harvested from the brains of vast cetacean-like Leviathans that swim the atmospheric currents of Jupiter.
Finding herself with no money and little to occupy her groundside, the narrator (“I”) takes a commission aboard the hunter-barque Pequod as it sets out in pursuit of precious spermaceti. Once aboard, however, she finds herself pulled inexorably into the orbit of the barque’s captain, a charismatic but fanatically driven woman who the narrator names only as “A”. As the Pequod plunges ever deeper into the turbulent, monster-haunted atmosphere of the gas giant, the narrator begins to lose herself in the eerie word of Leviathan-hunting and the captain’s increasingly insistent delusions; the only thing that might keep her grounded is the bond she develops with Q, a woman from the wreck of Old Earth whose skin is marked with holographic light and who remembers things otherwise lost.
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
Hell’s Heart‘s narration style did not work for me. I loved the premise so much. There’s something about the elusive quest. The hungering desperation and ambition. But Hell’s Heart narration lost me. First of all, I don’t normally do well with first person narration, but this also infused so much stream of consciousness within. These separate aren’t deal breakers for me, but together I found myself struggling. And while I loved the premise of the world, there were so many passages of info dumping. It’s this weird mix of where you often don’t narrate all the internal workings of our world all the time to yourself. So it’s hard, as a book, to balance giving readers information, while also being organic to this very personal and meandering narration style.
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Additionally, I didn’t click with the characters, or even our main character, because the narration style made it hard to connect to them. I never felt like I really got a grasp of any of the characters. They felt like they were wriggling out of my hands. I never got a sense of the main character or all the secrets they were hiding. Maybe if I listened to this in audio, this almost self-narration would work better for me. But it felt simultaneously dense sometimes in the content, while also feeling shallow in the getting to know everyone. I wanted to love this one, it just was not for me despite how much I was intrigued by the premise. Find Hell’s Heart on Goodreads, Storygraph, Bookshop. org, Blackwells, & Libro. fm.