Review: "The Real Jaws" by Rachel Lee Perez

The Real Jaws by Rachel Lee Perez
Published June 2025 via White Owl
★★★

Did you know that the first known representation of a shark attack is from 725 BCE...? I did not! And did you know that the movie Jaws has some basis in fact—a series of 1916 shark attacks on the New Jersey coast? I did not know that either.

In The Real Jaws, Perez dives into the history of those shark attacks and, critically, how they impacted the way people viewed sharks. I'm not entirely new to shark research (I once upon a time wrote an essay that was partly about sharks and that referenced some of the same sources she uses, which amuses me), but I wasn't familiar with the 1916 attacks or the other seasons of increased shark activity in various places. I did read the Wikipedia article on the 1916 attacks before I read the book—which I then regretted, because there would have been a bit more suspense for that part of the book if I hadn't known what to expect.

So it's fascinating material. Perez takes to the subject with plenty of enthusiasm (if a few too many exclamation marks) and a lot of research—anyone who likes leaping from a book into the reference section will be satisfied here. The beginning of the book has a timeline, which is full of events (e.g., polio outbreaks, war activities) that I initially thought were just for context but Perez tied neatly into the context of sharks and shark-human encounters. I don't take every conclusion at face value (e.g., Perez says that even the ISAF [International Shark Attack File] suggests on their website that people actively menstruating should avoid swimming in open water to reduce one's odds of being attacked by a shark (loc. 1562*), but what the ISAF actually says is much softer: If someone is attempting to maximize reduction of risks, staying out of the water during menstruation is one step that can be taken. However, many people safely dive while menstruating, and we have continued to see no obvious pattern of increased shark encounters.), but that's probably smart for most nonfiction; treat one source as one source but not as a definitive source without, erm, consulting other sources.

Writing-wise, this could have used another extensive round of line-level edits. I liked the overall structure (starting with the 1916 attacks and then moving on to theories about what caused so much shark activity, more recent shark-heavy seasons, and of course Jaws), but I spent far too long on lines like this one: This [multiple bites] is outside the standard behavior when a shark mistakenly bites a human. Why did the shark repeatedly bite Bruder when surely it must have known that its victim was indeed a human being? (loc. 625)

Perez later gets into what science now thinks about sharks—among other things, that they use biting to examine unknown things (they don't exactly have fingers to do the same job!)—but I was stuck on the fact that even if a shark bit somebody once and realized in doing so that it wasn't a seal, it wouldn't know the thing was specifically human; most likely it would just know that the thing it had bitten was living but not a seal or fish or whatever. Given that Perez also notes that violent language (attack, bite, deadly, etc.; e.g., loc. 2168) has widely been used to describe sharks and their interactions with humans, and that such language contributes to a public view of sharks as monsters, I also would have liked to see her use quite a bit less of the same language (my Kindle counts some 718 uses of the word "attack", though I should note that this includes the references, the table of contents, etc.).

All of this said: I learned a lot, and I came home from work with my nose buried in my Kindle and said absentmindedly to my partner, "Can we watch Jaws?" (and then went back to my book). An engaging read if you want to learn a bit about a forgotten (and gory) part of history, or if you need a shark week read.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.