Wild and Distant Seas

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.

July 1, 2024

Four generations of women use their magical gifts to search for and complete the family they each long for, with Moby-Dick as the novel's starting point. Evangeline Hussey, a young widow, runs an inn and chowder house on Nantucket in 1849, where she puts up a sailor named Ishmael and his companion, Queequeg. Evangeline has a brief affair with Ishmael until he signs on to the doomed whaling ship Pequod. He is long gone when Evangeline finds she is pregnant. She then foresees an infamous white whale's attack on the Pequod but knows that Ishmael will survive the wreck. Her daughter Rachel and subsequent generations spend their lives in search of Ishmael, using their psychic abilities to follow the path he left behind. When fourth-generation Annie returns to Nantucket in 1905, she is reunited with her great-grandmother, who tells her story, filling in the blanks in the family history. Roberts spins a gorgeous, lightly magical story about a generational search for family. Each woman searches for answers as best she can, creating her own story as she goes. Natasha Soudek expertly narrates this fabulous debut with feeling. VERDICT The quest for family is deep-rooted. Listeners will enjoy this tale of the search for the elusive Ishmael.--Joanna M. Burkhardt

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