[Review] Down in the Belly of the Whale - Kelley Kay Bowles

Summary: Harper Southwood is a teenage girl who can sense when people will get sick—but so what? She can’t predict her best friend’s depression or her mother’s impending health crisis. Being helpful is all Harper ever wanted, but she feels helpless in the face of real adversity. Now, she’s got a chance to summon her courage and use her wits to fight for justice. Laugh and cry along with this irrepressible, high-spirited teen in her journey of self-discovery, as she learns that compassion and internal strength are her real gifts, her true superpower. (Pub Date: May 5, 2018)

Honest review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.

This is a rare time that I feel I need to give four stars even though I never got that into the book.

Harper has the perfect family and that's why she's found out she's a changeling, a troll, because how could she be part of that family? And she has a very useless superpower of knowing when people are about to get sick. That's it, she can't do anything to prevent it, she simply feels in her something is wrong. And that's how she knew her best friend was cutting herself. And even that seems to be failing because her mother has something the doctors haven't found out and she never felt it (and this one seems to come from the writer's personal experience.

This book is deep. It is told in a very light way, I even wondered if it wasn't children's fiction, but it goes deeper and deeper. I guess the title makes sense.

So why did I say I didn't get into it? I think the writing is sometimes to prolix, I'm sure the author meant something by it but it didn't get through to me. And even though that made it really seem like the narrator was a teenager—I so used to write like that back then!—, during the dialogues, Harper and her friend never sounded legitimately like teenagers.

Still, the story was beautiful, well researched, well written. The kind of story I think YA should have more, because it's genuinely good. I know, it's weird that I'm saying this when I personally didn't enjoy it so much. But I repeat the problem was me and not the book. In other words, this book won't please everyone, it's not a light read even though it may seem so. The characters has layers and some get quite dark.

I also recommend this for book clubs. Oh, there's so much you can discuss! One thing that bothered me the whole book and that took way too long for the parents to tackle on was this belief Harper has that she isn't part of her own family. How many other teenagers don't think like that in different degrees? And there's more I don't want to spoil anyone about.

This is a beautiful book.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Also, you can check Harper's playlist here, kindly offered by the author.