FICTION

Wild and Distant Seas

by Tara Karr Roberts
Norton. Jan. 2024. 304p. ISBN 9781324064886. $27.99. F
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DEBUT Ishmael told the story of Moby-Dick, but it’s his lover and their descendants who tell the story of all the women whose lives were wrecked by their lovers’ passion for the sea in Roberts’s debut novel. From their mother, each girl inherits a magical gift for seeing into the memories of those around them and bending those memories to their will while from their father they inherit his mystery and absence. Their mother’s gift becomes a curse, however, as each generation attempts to keep secrets from the next while the lure of that shrouded, mysterious past pushes each daughter away from her mother and around the world until the tale comes full circle, back to Nantucket and the woman they all left behind.
VERDICT This story begins with a distaff perspective on the classic Moby-Dick but opens out to tell a wider story of gifts and curses, uses and obsessions, as generations of women pursue an elusive truth with the same single-mindedness that their father’s captain chased that whale. Recommended for readers of historical fiction, magical realism, and anyone searching for more woman-centric retellings of classic tales.
Reviewed by Marlene Harris , Jan 12, 2024
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