Wild and Distant Seas

August 1, 2023

Evangeline Hussey has a gift for reshaping the recent memories of those around her, which comes in handy when she's left managing a Nantucket inn when her husband is lost at sea. Then a dreamy sailor named Ishmael shows up, and after he heads off after a white whale, the narrative unfolds from Nantucket to Boston, Brazil, Florence, and Idaho to visit four women touched by Evangeline's story. One of the publisher's top books for the spring. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2023
A Nantucket widow inherits an inn, and three generations of women succeed her. Evangeline Hussey's husband has been dead for a couple of years when two strangers show up at her Nantucket inn requesting a place to stay. One "wore the outfit of a sailor, yet when he clasped my hand in his, I felt the soft, unmarred skin of a boy from the city," Evangeline says. "He said I should call him Ishmael." This cringeworthy moment is not the first hint that Roberts has used the characters and plot of Moby-Dick to undergird her debut novel--but it is the clearest, made with all the subtlety of a piano played by a baseball bat. Hussey's novel follows four generations of women who descend from Evangeline, but why she chose to root the tale in Melville's work isn't entirely clear. Without the references to Ishmael, Captain Ahab, et al., Roberts would have had a finely detailed piece of historical fiction on her hands, well researched and rich. She is a natural storyteller and her prose is engaging. But Melville is doing her no favors here. Nor are the magical threads woven through the story. Evangeline, it turns out, had a gift--she could see the recent memories of those around her--which her daughter, Rachel, inherits in her own way. Rachel has been given the power of suggestion and, simply by speaking, can convince those around her to bend to her will. All of this, taken together, feels rather like a smoke screen that hides the novel's real action. What's actually happening here? It doesn't look like Roberts could decide, so she threw everything in. Proceeding in fits and starts, this novel feels chaotic and poorly conceptualized.

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Starred review from November 20, 2023
Roberts draws in her stunning debut on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for a story of women with magical powers. Evangeline is 19 when she arrives in Nantucket in 1849 and takes a room at the Try Pots Inn. Six days later, she marries the inn’s proprietor, Hosea. Two years into their happy marriage, Hosea dies at sea. To ensure the inn won’t be taken away from her, Evangeline uses an ability she discovered as a child to look into other people’s minds and revise their memories. In this case, she makes the townsfolk believe Hosea will return. Eventually, a restless sailor named Ishmael arrives at the Try Pots with his handsome companion Queequeg, who rejects Evangeline’s advances. She then has an affair Ishmael, who impregnates her before the sailors leave on the Pequod to hunt an infamous white whale. Years later, Evangeline and Ishmael’s daughter, Rachel, who never met her father, is captivated by a series of seafaring stories published in a Boston newspaper. Believing the stories to be written by the long-lost Ishmael, she embarks on a dangerous ocean voyage to find him, using her own powers of mind control to survive. Roberts writes with confidence and dynamic range, mixing earthy details of dead fish and whale oil with sublime descriptions of the women’s psychic abilities (Evangeline sees others’ recent memories as “fresh and soft as paint on a canvas not yet dried”). This is beautiful. Agent: Chris Kepner, Kepner Agency.

November 1, 2023
Roberts' sweeping debut novel, a reimagining of Moby-Dick, tells the story of four generations of women. It begins on Nantucket in 1849 with Evangeline Hussey, a young widow who is content running her inn and making her chowders. One day, she is caught off guard by the arrival of a cheerful man who introduces himself as Ishmael. His stay is short-lived; he soon sets sail on the doomed Pequod with Captain Ahab. But his legacy will ripple through the years. In his own way, he is the white whale for Evangeline's descendants, and their journeys span the globe, taking them from Nantucket to Boston, Brazil, Italy, and Idaho. Each of the women--Evangeline, Rachel, Mara, and Antonia--possesses a touch of magic, each using her own unique ability to her advantage in some way. The magic is subtle, woven seamlessly into the narrative, so it does not feel out of place in this otherwise traditional work of historical fiction. Each woman's story builds to a beautiful conclusion, and the themes of love, motherhood, and the quest to find one's purpose in life resonate throughout. Fans of Christina Baker Kline's The Exiles (2020) and Julie Gerstenblatt's Daughters of Nantucket (2023) will flock to Roberts' tale.

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January 12, 2024

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.--Marlene Harris

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