49 pages • 1 hour read
Emily HabeckShark Heart: A Love Story
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Angela”
Part 2, Pages 187-203 Summary
Part 2 focuses on the story of Wren’s mother, Angela. During the summer of Angela’s 15th birthday, she is living in a dysfunctional household. Her mother has an alcohol addiction, and her father is largely absent, working long hours at his medical practice. Angela does not have many friends at school and is struggling with the changes that puberty has wrought on her body. On the morning of her birthday, Angela’s mother, Colleen, mistakenly wishes her a happy 16th. When Angela corrects her, Colleen tells her, “You’re looking mature for your age. […] You don’t want people to get the wrong idea about you. You’re a good girl” (191). Angela is disturbed by her words, particularly since she is keenly aware that she attracts lots of male attention.
Not wanting to be in the house with her mother too much, Angela begins frequenting a local tennis court. There, she becomes drawn to Marcos, an older man (his age is never specified, but he is implied to be in his late teens or early twenties), who also comes to play tennis on a regular basis. The two begin flirting, and eventually, he invites her to visit his houseboat, informing her that he makes money in the summer by selling off parts of the boat. They skinny dip on his boat, and Angela loses her virginity to Marcos. Angela is increasingly obsessed with Marcos and immersed in his world.
Part 2, Pages 204-231 Summary
Angela begins to spend nights over on Marcos’s boat, fabricating a story to her mother about having sleepovers with a friend named “Lisa.” Angela feels recognized and valued by Marcos in a way that she never feels around her family, especially when he offers her compliments. Despite this, Marcos becomes avoidant when Angela asks him if she is his girlfriend. Confused, Angela goes kayaking to clear her mind and in the process loses a bracelet her mother gave her. She begins to feel that she has lost her childhood innocence.
Angela starts losing focus in school, especially after she begins smoking marijuana with Marcos. Furthermore, she realizes that she is pregnant. Marcos is excited by this news, telling her that they will be together as a family. During a tense family dinner, Angela’s parents announce that they are getting a divorce, and Angela announces her pregnancy. Her parents insist that she needs to marry Marcos, but Angela says she does not believe in marriage. Colleen leaves the family shortly afterward, and Angela and Marcos quickly run out of money. Marcos begins working at a factory to make ends meet, and Angela drops out of school.
Part 2, Pages 232-254 Summary
Marcos begins to physically abuse Angela, and against her better judgment, Angela feels satisfied with the abuse as a new form of physical attention from him. She goes to find work at a motel, where she befriends Julia, a Chickasaw woman who stands up for her when guests of the motel are vocally judgmental of her pregnancy. Julia offers Angela a support system in the form of her family; her brother, George, regularly picks the two girls up from work and takes them to the family home, where Julia’s mother, Theresa, offers her food. Theresa plans to support Angela as much as possible, especially since she notices the bruises on Angela’s arms from Marcos’s abuse.
George and Angela grow close, and George develops a crush on her. On Christmas Eve, George drives Angela home to Marcos’s boat, and Marcos notices them flirting. Inside, Marcos demands that she quit her job and demands to know if she loves him. After Angela stops working at the motel, Marcos’s abuse escalates, until one day he pushes her to the ground, and her face starts bleeding.
Part 2, Pages 255-316 Summary
With nowhere else to go, Angela takes herself to the motel. Julia and George come to take care of her, and doctors determine that she has a fractured forearm. Julia insists that Angela should live with her family to stay away from Marcos. The flirtation between George and Angela escalates once she moves in, with George bringing her strawberry milkshakes (Julia’s favorite flavor) every day after work and doting on her at family gatherings. Julia figures out what is going on.
Angela gives birth in the hospital and decides to name her baby Wren, after a bird she watches outside her window in the delivery room. She returns to work at the motel, where Marcos stalks her in the parking lot. Despite Julia and Theresa’s concerns, Angela decides to rekindle her relationship with him. This does not go well since Marcos continues to be unpredictable and physically intimidating. Discontent with fatherhood, he abruptly decides to leave for a commune in New Mexico.
George and Angela’s relationship becomes increasingly serious as Wren approaches her first birthday, and it drives Julia and Angela apart. George is happy to become a father figure for Wren and offers support in a way that Marcos never did. Around this time, Angela starts having strange symptoms. Her elbow locks up one day while giving Wren a hug around the neck, and George and Theresa have to wrestle Wren out of her arms. Angela goes to the doctor and is diagnosed with a mutation that will turn her into a Komodo dragon. Fearing for her loved ones, Angela breaks up with George even as he begs her to marry him. Wren grows up caring for her mother as the mutation progresses. Once Angela becomes violent (attacking Wren and eating a golden retriever), she is transferred to a specialist facility that will eventually release her in her natural habitat in Indonesia.
Part 2 Analysis
Though Part 1 foreshadowed the situation with Wren’s mother, its hints were vague. Part 2 fully reveals this backstory, clarifying the generational traumas that have shaped Wren’s personality and actions. Angela’s story carries forward the themes of Navigating Terminal Illness and Anticipatory Grief and Transient but Formative Female Relationships. At the same time, it introduces the subject matters of domestic abuse, alcohol addiction, and teenage pregnancy, all of which have indirectly influenced the course of Wren’s life. In this sense, Part 2 is just as concerned with characterizing Wren as it is with characterizing Angela.
Habeck establishes several parallels between Wren and Angela. Primary among these are their childhoods with mothers who could not adequately care for them. Angela’s mother’s alcohol addiction and emotional abuse of Angela leave Angela feeling unsupported and unworthy. When Colleen leaves the family, her impersonal notes to Angela underscore the emotional disconnect between mother and daughter: “Come visit, doll! xoxoxoxo, MOM” (292). Still, there are glimpses of what the relationship could have been if not for Colleen’s struggles with alcohol. In a moment of vulnerability, she asks Angela, “Can I hold you again, like when you were little?” (216). This affectionate tone reveals the maternal love that Colleen feels for Angela, which goes unexpressed during her bouts of extensive drinking.
The tension between the reality of Angela and Colleen’s mother-daughter relationship and the ideal of what it could have been serves as a reminder that Colleen’s alcohol addiction is a debilitating illness. It is debilitating to the same degree that the mutations are, impairing Colleen’s relationships and ultimately driving her away from her family. Like Wren, Angela thus grows up caring for an ailing mother, and the opening sentences of Part 3 establish her role as caretaker: “As an only child, Angela nurtured her parents, as if they were static fixtures in the house requiring regular maintenance” (190). This frames navigating illness as a generational trauma for the women in Wren’s family.
When Colleen cannot support Angela in the way that Angela needs, Julia and her mother step in to become a pseudo-maternal support system for Angela, now an expectant mother herself. Chickasaw society is matrilineal, and this environment seems to be a natural space for Angela to receive that female mentorship that she has always craved. Theresa steps into this role very intentionally, thinking to herself, “Angela is a sweet girl, and I will do my best to help her… as she gave Angela second helpings of beans, rice, and cornbread” (240). The act of feeding Angela has a highly maternal connotation, and it is something that Theresa does throughout her time caring for Angela. This support from within the Chickasaw community is the closest thing Angela ever receives to familial acceptance: “No one among Julia’s family or friends passed judgment on Angela, the only white girl in the group” (240). Though these formative female relationships turn out to be transient, they offer Angela a launchpad to do better for her own daughter than Colleen did for her. Habeck thus illustrates how cyclical trauma can be gradually alleviated through resources like community support.
