Hell’s Heart by Alexis Hall | Quick Thoughts #bookbites #booktubetbr #booktube

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]I finished two books yesterday. I want to tell you about one of them. I read Hell's Heart by Alexis Hall. The tagline for this is Sapphic Moby Dick in space and it's it's pretty fitting. I have not read Moby Dick. So, starting this one, I went in fairly blind. I know that I know the premise of Moby Dick, okay? I know the gist. This was such a fun take. It's told in first person point of view and we have a multitude of fourth wall breaks that really just help like make this feel like we're being told this story by somebody that we just met in a bar. And our narrator, I This is a horny bisexual loser. I She excels at nothing except pissing people off and [ __ ] anybody that she wants. And I really enjoyed how unlikable she was. Like, at no point was there any character growth that made her a likable person. She just was not and it was great. It worked well for the story. I liked that we got to see the descent into madness from our captain A and how the crew around them responded to that. I can see why this book is divisive. So, this is not a like universally loved book. It's slow. It's very slow-paced. Constantly we're getting interjections about Leviathan anatomy or ship construction. Feels like a rambling conversation and for somebody with ADHD, it worked for me because the moment I started to get a little bit unfocused on some aspect, we'd basically switch topics. There's time jumps throughout this. It's just kind of a mess and I loved every minute of this.

[00:01:28]This was perfect to me. I have no notes, no complaints, but I can understand why somebody might not like it.

[00:01:34]To each their own.