Who Picked Shadow Divers?: My father-in-law
Would I Have Picked it For Myself?: Not a chance, but I did share the Goodreads link with my WWII-fascinated husband before wiping it from my memory.
It’s not that I don’t find the mystery of a sunken German U-boat off the New Jersey coast interesting; had the guys at Astonishing Legends done a multi-episode, short series on it for their podcast I’m sure I would’ve loved it. But listening to an older gent who sounds a little too similar to the “this is Audible” voice for 16 hours was a bit too much for me.
16 long hours.
— Disclaimer: Again, this book was 100% not for me and I only read it because my father-in-law (who gave it 4/5 stars on Goodreads, compared to our 3.17/5 average) picked it. I swear I tried to limit my snark (it won’t read like it), but I think all the rewrites attempting to be less assholery may have actually had an adverse effect on my psyche, allowing my sass to build on itself into something more monstrous. Whoops. —
Even if consuming nonfiction in this medium didn’t already have me contemplating throwing myself overboard, a book about wreck divers was always going to be a hard sell because it seems more akin to grave robbing to me, no matter how much participants want to call it a sport. Basically it’s like calling Lara Croft a star athlete in the sport of tomb raiding, so these scavengers and I are just going to have to agree to disagree on the ethics of this and the hoards of fancy china piled in their garages that I will continue to judgmentally side-eye safely from miles away (as not to be hit with the curse liberating those items from the sea floor’s clutches 100% unleashed).
So yeah… the idea of simply reading this already had me contemplating the merits of drowning, and Robert Kurson’s first two chapters introducing us to this world did nothing to change that. Instead I found myself looking for the best rocks to fill my diving gear with to make sure the job gets done, as chapter 1 introduces us to the world of wreck diving through Bill Nagle, a philandering drunk asshole who abandoned his wife and kids for the sea life (who, at his worst, decided against following protocol to report a missing diver to the Coast Guard to protect the U-boat wreck site from other potential thieves); and chapter 2 immediately halts the narrative by detouring into a lengthy science lesson on the dangers of the bends — word overuse pet peeve activated: “narcosis” is used 54 times (28 in chapter 2 alone), “narced” 6 times, and “jungle drums 7” times — something most writers would probably wait to do til it was actually relevant to the story.
As a result, two chapters in and I was already cranky and bored, and though I was doing my best to give these men (and one woman who briefly makes an appearance for the sole reason of providing the opportunity for a “get back in the kitchen” joke) the benefit of the doubt because I do 100% believe in their mission to uncover the identity of the U-boat we finally get introduced to (and bring comfort to the families of the men who were lost along with it), I was once again throwing the most dramatic of side-eye at them as they waffled about their moral high ground. Long story short, our two lead divers (John Chatterton and Richie Kohler) make the decision to not steal from the soldiers aboard this particular vessel because the bones of their fellow seamen brotherhood members were still trapped within, thus making the act of scavenging suddenly distasteful. Did they throw this respect out the window when they discovered this particular vessel could potentially make them millionaires thanks to the mass stores of mercury that might be contained within its walls? Yes. Did they start disrespectfully chucking items back into the ocean from the surface instead of placing them back where they found them (or at least near the wreck site) once they got as tired as I was with the lather, rinse, repeat nature of their years of research, cross referencing, interviews, and diving? Also yes.
Side-eye glare intensifies.
It’s not that the years of struggles weren’t worth recounting, it was just so monotonous. So much so that by the time the U-boat’s identity was eventually discovered (after a multitude of false finishes) I completely missed what item onboard the vessel disclosed the information; and I did not care enough to backtrack to find out. I was just too glad to finally be at the end of the journey to do so. And as much as I enjoyed learning about the German soldiers who were aboard to bring more humanity to the story — a nice touch, and something I wasn’t necessarily expecting considering the first person to die on this expedition of discovery didn’t seem to get the same level of respect (though I suppose the title did promise only to care about two of the divers – everyone else is just varying degrees of “and they were also there” levels of import [from kitchen wench to worthy of a whole page of exposition]) — I was, to put it simply, done.
All of this to reiterate once again, if it wasn’t abundantly clear, Shadow Divers was not for me, which is why I will encourage everyone to take this review with an ocean’s worth of grains of salt. Sure, my complaints with the storytelling structure are valid (and plenty of my fellow book club members had similar gripes), but maybe had I actually been interested in the topic I would’ve been more forgiving towards the elements that annoyed me the most.
Average Rating (MIL, SIL, sister, BIL, me, mom, FIL): 3.17 out of 5
Up Next: I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara
Middle of the Row 