Wow. Long. Interesting.
The book's tone did remind me of a novel from the 18th or 19 century. NOW I know I must really read Moby-Dick.
It's fascinating and now that I've read the whole thing and the author's comments, I ant to read it again so I can fully realize the impact. But the book is just too long for that...and life is to short. I feel like I've devoted my summer to reading this book.
And I have....

This is a magnificent book! I think I loved every page. It's beautifully written and full of the adventures of a convention-defying woman from girlhood on. The first sentence grabbed me: "Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last."

Obviously, it helps if you've read and loved _Moby-Dick_. I did, as a teen, not as a school assignment but on my own; it kept me up all night. But even if you haven't read the tale of the white whale, this is still a great story. If you *have* read M-D, you'll wait a good long while through Una's young womanhood before you meet Captain Ahab or other characters from Melville's book. But meet them you do, along with many other memorable people. If you haven't read M-D and aren't going to, I suggest you read a synopsis to enrich the experience of this account.

I can't recommend it highly enough. It's long, but well worth the time. The ending is rich, and unexpected until very near the end.

I wasn't sure if I was going to enjoy this book when I first started reading it, but I really did. The book is a long one (nearly 700 pages, if memory serves), but it's rather engrossing. For me, it didn't have a section where I had to force myself to continue reading because I was bored (that sometimes happens to me). The characters are appealing, the plot is engaging (a little unbelievable at times, but I think that was intentional), and it's well-written. I particularly enjoyed what I would guess you'd call the book's meta-physics - the way it takes side-tracks to discuss time, loss, maturity, life, etc. - without sounding preachy. These sections were thought-provoking, yet didn't take away from the book's plot or flow.

Ahab's Wife is a novel about the life of the Pequod captain's wife, so there's a lot of Moby Dick in here. But you wouldn't necessarily have had to have read or enjoyed reading Moby Dick to enjoy this book. It's an interesting look at the options available for women at the time through the eyes of a woman who chooses to make her own options and her own life. It's also an interesting look at 19th century life and some famous authors and philosophers from that time period.

I recently re-read this book. I highly recommend it. Makes you want to read Moby Dick again! It was interesting to read it again after living in Louisville. A good portion of the book takes place right outside of Louisville in its early days and they even mention Locust Grove - the historic home where I used to work!

Ick. I hated this book. I felt that the author was basically living out her own fantasy of being adored by these historical and fictional men. I mean, she even finds a way to work in Hawthrone and Emerson having a crush on her. It's the kind of book where the heroine stands on the deck of ships (or ports, or lighthouses) with her hair blowing in the wind a lot. All men want her. She survives great hardship with her noble spirit intact. And she has an intelligent, sensitive soul that is eventually recognized by the greatest minds of her generation. Historical fiction or historical masturbation?

i had high hopes for this book. i needed an adventure. i needed something that was not idiotic. i picked a couple of pages at random, and it seemed well done. The language, in the beginning, was beautiful and distracting. The story seemed to have an anti-bullshit female character (which i typically distrust, as the author will inevitably take them too far one direction or another) without the i am woman hear me roar cheese. The story moved well, and seemed strong....somewhere around the later middle of the book, i began to sense that things were unraveling. Not for the character, but with the author. Certain events had been described to death, while other more significant things were barely mentioned. i passed it off as a style and pressed on. By the end, i realized that the book that had seemed so promising had let me down. i was kind of irritated. It had so much POTENTIAL. Damn. And then, because it was too late at night to start another book, i decided to read the "P.S" included in the back, about the author. It was a huge mistake. It is always a huge mistake. i have a firm rule about looking at author photos..i don't like to know in the beginning, lest it sway my opinion somehow (not because i'm a shallow asshole, but because the words, if written properly, will give themselves a voice, and i don't want some disembodied head floating around bonking into the images i get in my brain). It makes no sense and i won't try and justify it. So, imagine the disembodied head telling you things. Things about why it wrote blah blah section and what to think about blah blah's character. Anyway, she went on to describe how she didn't do an outline. How sometimes, she didn't even know what was going to happen to her character. That was pretty apparent by the end. Threads every which way. Maybe i was so annoyed by what she had to say about the writing of the book that i have judged it too harshly. Perhaps, had i not read the P.S. i would be more forgiving. i usually don't bother with a review, but goddamn it, this could have been good. Stupid P.S.

I did it! I finished it! I liked this book, but I don't see how it could be a bestseller. It feels far too peculiar and dense and poetic (which partly bothered me) to be appeal to your average reader. It's an impressive book, nonetheless. I obviously need to read Moby Dick now.

Poetical, mystical, beautiful, shocking, violent, bizarre, thought-provoking. Can't even explain why I like this book. Fires, whales, lighning, storms, love, heroism, desperation, sacrifice, myth, stars, ice, sea, sky, crows nests, sex, writing, religion and yet more whales.
I would have given it 5 stars, but the book fades a little in the last quarter and has some minor charaters who could be cut at no detriment to the story.

A stunning, magnificent book!--Certainly in my top 10 ever!--great story, great characters, big ideas, & colorful writing that, like Jane Smiley's book about Bleeding Kansas, evokes the language of its period while also speaking in a distinctive voice to our own time. The narrator is the wife of Ahab, captain of the Pequod of Moby Dick fame. It's about several things, but principally about, I think, a woman "choosing life"--choosing her own path in the world and affirming life in the midst of stark suffering. It's also about redemption, forgiveness, and acceptance in the face of shocking revelations, or tolerance of more mundane difference. But it's a sophisticated notion of tolerance & acceptance. In one beautiful scene, Una--Ahab's wife--a "liberal" or "progressive" in religious matters, leanrs that her dear friend, the runaway slave Susan, believes that the Lord has led her to freedom. At first Una worries that Susan will want to impose her faith, but she wakes the next morning to her accustomed acceptance, which embraces a dwarf slave bounty hunter and a gay neighbor as well. The book embraces the ideas of antebellum America & includes cameos by several famous people, such as Margaret Fuller & Frederick Douglass. I've not been so captivated by the tone, substance, & main character of a book since The Fall of the Sparrow.

I'm finally done with this book. It was an exhausting effort. At times, I would have given this book a 4, at times a 2. I compromised with a 3. I loved the middle of this book. When Una goes to sea and later Kentucky, I was hooked. The beginning and end were a test of patience, but I was already invested. The wordiness of this author was over the top. And, that's what made this novel a 2 for me. I like to leave a little up to my imagination instead of having everything drawn out for me.

This book is about Nantucket, one of the most wondeful places on this earth! If you are one of the people who could NOT get through Moby Dick by Melville, here is the same story seen through the eyes of Ahab's wife. While Moby Dick is impossible to get through, this book you cannot put down! A wonderful story. The book is full of historical facts relevant to the 1800s, whaling and Nantucket. Yopu will fall in love with Nantucket, and the story is marvelous.

n  Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last.n

This is the story of Una Spenser's life from her early childhood in Kentucky to her life with relatives on a remote lighthouse island. At 16, she runs away disguised as a boy to sail on a whaling ship. What follows is a story of romance, danger, and madness. Based on a passage from Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Naslund creates a life for the woman who was Ahab's wife.

Let me preface this review by saying I have yet to finish Moby Dick, so I am sure there are quite a few things that might have gone over my head. I did like the book though. It was very atmospheric and quite the adventure story. The author did a great job making the whaling ships of the 1800s come alive. Una was allowed to grow through the story but was never became unrecognizable over the years of the story. I was excited to revisit Nantucket after reading The Movement of Stars (and meeting the real woman who inspired that book). I love that the book was populated by so many real characters (although I did start getting a Forrest Gump feel from it after a while).

What irritated me most about the book is that I don't know what the point was. It's entitled Ahab's Wife but the part about Ahab is only like 1/4 of the book. The book jumped around a lot and had a lot going on and then just sort of ended. It was hard to really nail down a single theme that stuck out and it seemed very disjointed at parts. Some of this could have been solved by editing I believe as there was a great deal that seemed extraneous.

I would recommend this to those who like long, epic fiction to get lost in. If you like Margaret George, this has a lot in common with her books except that the protagonist is completely fictional.

Reading Outside the Box Challenge: Chunkster-time! – read a book that is longer 500 pages.