"Jay Gardiner has given himself a fool's errand: to find the remains of his deceased father in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Monastery Beach. He knows it's a long shot, but Jay feels it's the only way for him to lift the weight of guilt he has carried since his dad's death by suicide the previous year. The dive begins well enough, but the sudden appearance of a giant squid puts Jay in very real jeopardy, made infinitely worse by the arrival of a sperm whale looking to feed. Suddenly, Jay is caught in the squid's tenacles and drawn into the whale's mouth where he is pulled into the first of its four stomachs. He quickly realizes he has only one hour before his oxygen tanks run out--one hour to defeat his demons and escape the belly of a whale"--

Let's give Kraus credit first. We absolutely believe he went very deep on whales and diving and wrote something that is very accurate to the details of both. In that sense, there's something kind of impressive about this project. But that detail does not a good novel make. A story of a son looking to redeem himself to his community by retrieving his father's body from a lake, Whalefall proceeds to go from one improbable thing to another as it tries to both raise the stakes of the dive and tie some very weird and very tenuous connection between a whale and the teen's dead father. Yes, sperm whale behave in all the ways described and yes, everything that happens is plausible, but just because each step of the teen's being swallowed and then escaping the whale was possible, all of these things together strain credulity. It would be earthshattering enough just to see a giant squid alive, and that's only the first of about ten unprecedented things the main character experiences (I can't say sees, because some of the crazy events, including a killer whale attack, happen while the teen is literally in the whale's stomach. Stringing together a dozen virtually impossible things does not make a story believable. On top of this, the teen's oxygen deprivation leads him to hallucinate that the whale is somehow communicating to him as his dead father giving advice, and sorry, that's just straight up dumb. I don't know. Maybe it's fun to read so many descriptions of different stomachs and digestive processes of whales to somebody. That somebody was not NUBClub.