Ahab's Wife or, The Star-Gazer [B0174]

2005 PB with minor wear. By a UU author - and one of Ginny Taylor's favorite books :) From the opening line--"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last"--you will know that you are in the hands of a masterful storyteller and in the company of a fascinating woman hero. Inspired by a brief passage in Melville's Moby-Dick, where Captain Ahab speaks passionately of his young wife on Nantucket, Una Spenser's moving tale "is very much Naslund's own and can be enjoyed independently of its source." (Newsday) The daughter of a tyrannical father, Una leaves the violent Kentucky frontier for the peace of a New England lighthouse island, where she simultaneously falls in love with two young men. Disguised as a boy, she earns a berth on a whaling ship where she encounters the power of nature, death, and madness, and gets her first glimpse of Captain Ahab. As Naslund portrays Una's love for the tragically driven Ahab, she magnificently renders a real, living marriage and offers a new perspective on the American experience.

From Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Magnificent. It is rare that I slow down my reading so that the story will last, but this was an epic novel, so beautifully written it had to be savored. I am at a loss to understand why it hasn't ended up as a series on PBS, or won more acclaim, but I now definitely count Sena Jeter Naslund among my favorite authors."; "An unusual book. It is a compilation of Moby Dick characters, plot lines, and themes merged with ideas from the early women’s rights movement, science, religion, poetry, and slavery."; "This was quite a read -- 666 pages -- and I loved every moment of it. I came in cold, since I had not read Moby Dick, but that didn't matter at all. The character development was really well done. All in all I really liked this grand adventure."; "My epic read of 2025. This one is so good —- long and unrushed in the best way. I couldn’t tell you what exactly the plot is, mostly just the life of an amazing woman. It was so beautiful, and I loved her adventures."