shawnee’s Reviews > Shark Heart > Status Update

“The small hand wants to pull away from her mother’s safe hold. The small, dear hand needs to swim, explore, love. The ocean cannot be contained; neither can love; neither can Joy. Wren loosens her grasp. It is so hard to let go.”

“And if Margaret wasn’t talking, she was singing, and to Lewis’s complete vexation, the only songs in her repertoire were snippets of three hits from the early 2000s…as well as Avril Lavigne’s first two albums, which she knew by heart.”

ugh margaret c finnegan is so me

“What remained strong in the deep, the hard times, was love as an effort, a doing, a conscious act of will. Soulmates, like her and Lewis, were not theoretical and found. They were tangible, built.”

“All the hours he spent theorizing about magic seemed so naive now. The main ingredient in transformation was not magic. It was pain.”

“The doctors focused on subtraction, what was being taken from his human experience, but they failed to see the incredible features and traits being added in the process.”

“The best he had to offer anything was right now. And maybe that had always been true.”

“Through the music’s swells, they swayed, and they knew, and they held each other, and they knew, and they melted, and they knew, and they knew, and they knew: Everything would be different and difficult soon.”

“It was the most hopeful thing anyone could have said, a bypassing of the truth, because there would not be another year to measure against this first one.”

“It was as if her psyche contained a magnet that activated its pull only when she was away from the Great Plains and her mother.”