Peter Benchley

Jaws

This level 2, elementary Penguin Reader contains 500 words and tells the story of Amity, a quiet town near New York, that gets terrorized by a great white shark. Policeman Brody is a good policeman and tries to close the beaches, but people won't listen to him.

Patrick Book

Very exciting! And very different from the movie, in many ways. Classic indeed!

When three people are killed by a great white shark in three different incidents, the police chief of a Long Island resort town is forced to take action.

ophelia ross 

Erik Wallace

Great read for the summertime. Highly recommended.

i'm gonna just stick to the movie in the future i think

Mariann

Mark

So very different, and better, than the film, far more about the characters relationships

C. J. Daley 

Full disclosure for this one, the movie is my grandfather and father’s favorite movie, I grew up on it, so the movie and its plot line have a very nostalgic pull for me. We used to rent the same house in Lavallette, New Jersey every summer, and watching Jaws on the first night we arrived was always the tradition. 

With that being said, the opening of the novel felt like a very straight forward and true adaptation. The shark descriptors and kills were perhaps more gruesome, but the general feel was the same. I was very into it at this point. It was around a quarter in or so, where the differences started to show themselves, where I started to pull away. 

To me, it feels like the author said…’well, how do you make a novel about a shark interesting??? You could simply stay out of the water right?’ This is where I feel like the movie simply made them enter the ocean sooner to do away with that point. Instead, the author added strange somewhat mafia-fueled political intrigue. The author also includes a subplot including main characters and adultery, toxic masculinity, and a REAL weird conversation about rape fantasies…seriously wtf. 

Part of me still really enjoyed the shark stuff and the nostalgic feels they brought with them. Although they don’t get on the boat until literally 75% through the story, I feel like the Orca, Quint, and the climax salvage the novel somewhat. Sharks are scary. Personally a 3/5* for me still, a very rare ‘the movie is better’ here.

Wynter

2017 review: Shark Week continues, and what kind of Shark Week can survive without a reread of Jaws? This time I liked the book even more. The tension between Chief Brody and Ellen was actually incredibly well-done. You have a husband and a wife who came from different social backgrounds: she is still an outsider in this island community and earns for days gone by. She is plagued by all the what-ifs and the glitzy upper class crowds that swarm the town every summer. Her husband, on the other hand, lacks confidence when confronted by those of glamour and money, and becomes defensive whenever he feels his little status quo is threatened. I was reading these parts and thinking to myself, Wow, this is actually a very well-written piece of family drama that touches on existential crisis and social inequality. I never really got it before. 

But the ending still sucked. While the three movie endings were trying to outdo each other with over-the-top action (electrocution, anyone?), I really wanted for something a bit more dramatic for the book than was presented. My alternative suggestion would be (view spoiler)[for the shark to drag down and swallow Quint, only to choke on him to death. (hide spoiler)] Wouldn't that be poetic justice?



2013 review: It would have been a five-star book, if the finale wasn't so lackluster. Seriously shark, after all that you're just gonna go ahead and die like that?

Fellowes Cynthia

Read it years ago. Fun read and the movie is fantastic.

Katharina Hoffmann

UPDATE: vilest book of 2021 & the vilest book I've ever read! Every copy belongs in an incinerator!
___________
What I expected this book to be like: (baby) shark doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, (baby) shark doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo
What I got instead: let’s talk about sex baby

This book was so appallingly bad, disastrous, and misogynistic that it's making me rethink all my previous one-star rated books and whether they truly deserved it when a book as vile and tedious as this one exists. Who in their right mind decided this book is a classic? A masterpiece? Luckily, I only watched the film after I had finished this book because, BOY, would I have been disappointed!

Everyone knows the story: Amity, a little town of about 1000 inhabitants on the East Coast of the United States, is suddenly haunted by a Great White, a killer shark. It's summer, and the whole town relies on the season to survive. In the summer, the 1000-people village grows to a 10.000-people town. Business is business, and the beaches are essential to attract visitors to Amity.
After the first shark' incident' in the first chapter of the book, police chief Brody wants to close the beaches after it becomes clear that a shark is to blame for the death of a young woman. The town's mayor, Larry Vaughn, convinces Brody NOT to CLOSE THE BEACHES because he is obviously more interested in the money the tourists will bring in than saving people's lives. The beaches stay open, more people die, the beaches get closed, it's the 4th of July, and the beaches are opened, even more people die.

BUT GUESS WHAT: this is not the book's main plot! No, the book's main plot is Brody's wife's infidelity! Large portions of the book are about her being unfaithful and sleeping with Matt Hooper, the shark expert hired by the town to help Brody investigate the incidents.

I'm not lying when I say that this book was more about sex, rape, and sexual fantasies than it was about a shark.
- Brody, the Chief of Police, is introduced through this line:  "The first ring of the phone was assimilated into his dream; a vision that he was back in high school, groping a girl on a stairwell." 
- Hendricks, another police officer, is introduced through this line:  "Patrolman Len Hendricks sat at his desk in the Amity police station, reading a detective novel called 'Deadly, I'm Yours'. At the moment, the phone rang, the heroine, a girl named 'Whistling Dixie', was about to be raped by a motorcycle club." 

Both of these quotes appear two chapters into the novel. And it only got worse:

When Hendricks finds the first victim's body, his main thought is that  "the woman's remaining breast looked as flat as a flower, pressed in a memory book".
What the fuck @ Peter Benchley? What the actual fuck? That's the first thing that comes to mind when the officer finds a woman's torso viciously attacked and killed by a shark?

And it got even worse:
Before Brody's wife sleeps with Hooper, the shark expert, they meet at a restaurant where he asks her about her 'fantasies'. She then admits to regularly entertaining 'rape fantasies', claiming that the rape is scary at first in her fantasies but gets 'fun' after a while when the man 'has worked her up'. LIKE WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU; BENCHLEY?? This is the excuse rapists and their defenders have been using for hundreds of years, that 'WOMEN ACTUALLY ENJOY IT; THEY JUST DON'T WANT TO ADMIT IT'.

Believe me, the entire book read like that. This is not a story about a shark because, hey, the shark is a side character in its own book! No, this a pervert's dreams and realities come to life as ink on paper, and it is fucking disgusting.

Oh, and everything you just read? That's only the most obvious misogynist bits. I haven't yet mentioned the book's racism that, e.g. finds expression in sentences like:  "Police work offered security […] and the chance for some fun […] (the summer before, a black gardener had raped seven rich white women, not one of whom would appear in court to testify against him)." 
Of course, the rapist was black! Of course, he was! Because when white men rape a woman, it's not rape, it's consensual sex!

Few books have ever managed to make me as furious and outraged as this one. AVOID, AVOID, AVOID!

Jasmine Tania

So this is a hard book to rate. The writing was good, but man did the plot get muddled and sidetracked. Not only was the movie better about talking about the shark, but it managed to convey the issues in politics without the silly affair. Honestly the affair added nothing to the book, as the shark didn't relate and even Hooper didn't really relate.other than only being there for the shark.

All in all it was a very crass book that didn't really need to be that crass unnecessarily.

Catherine Nicolai

I was surprised with how different the book was from the movie, but the book definitely held my attention.

Bruno Darío

Wtf???? DNF cuando ha empezado a decir que todas las chicas sueñan con ser prostitutas y que la fantasía de una de ellas es que la violen. He flipado. Hasta luego, Peter.

Kauffie

a moment where I’ll actually say the movie was better (I only watched it upon finishing the book in desperate need of an explanation as to why people love it [Jaws] so much) 

Venessa Johnstone

Ciska van Bokhorst

Wel grappig om te lezen. Niet zo heel veel haai erin. Vooral in het tweede was geen haai te bekennen. Lang niet zo creepy als ik dacht, durf de film niet te kijken, en na het lezen van dit boek durf/ doe ik het nog steeds niet.

Jaws

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