Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful
Review: From the moment this book began I was hooked. With an opening like, "Ahab was not my first husband or my last. . ." how could you not be. Moby Dick while a great work of fiction, told us nothing about the wife he so obviously loved who waited for him at home. To have her story told is brilliant. She is no longer an unknown character, but a full personality. Her story is so much more than Ahab and so fulfilling that it is something I suggest needs to be read, even if you have never read Moby Dick. It is a story that is strong enough to stand on it's own. You will get lost in this book, it is a pleasent surprise in a world so often full of mediocre literature.
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Summary: Ahab's Wife
Review: A great story. I didn't want it to end. Definitely a story to get lost in.
Rating: 
Summary: "Melville in a Blouse and Skirt"
Review: [Note: This review appeared December 2, 1999, in the Seattle Weekly ...]Ahab's wife Una has spent her first pregnancy at her mother's Kentucky cabin -Ahab is away at sea, of course, busy whaling - and though her labor starts hard it fails to progress. Her mother rides into the icy night for a doctor, and Una is oblivious with pain when a runaway woman slave creeps through the cabin door and into her bed. A gang of bounty hunters led by a dwarf cloaked in wolfskin bursts in after the runaway but, persuaded by the compassionate dwarf not to grope under the bedclothes of a woman in travail, they soon depart. The women snuggle beneath the plump quilts, Una laughing with merry affection when not gasping with birth pangs. At last the infant Liberty is born. And Liberty dies. And dawn brings news of another disaster - Una's mother has frozen to death in the snow. Una, gazing skyward beside the grave that holds both her mother and her child, wonders if the universe is punishing her, but she rallies. She outfits her new friend for a flight to freedom and sends her skipping North across the floes of the frozen river like Liza in UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. We're on page 13. And there are 650 to go, profuse in events, literary allusions, and love. For love is the answer - Una's every nerve vibrates with this truth. Thus she will never quite understand (although she'll forgive) the monomaniacal vengeance that her beloved husband later pursues against the White Whale and against the blankness of the existential void. What void? Rapt attention to each moment shows that life is full, and glorious. Naslund takes us back to Una's childhood in leisurely poetical fashion. Twelve-year-old Una is sent away from her brutal zealot of a father to live with relatives at a lighthouse overlooking the Atlantic, where she learns to love the stars and the sea. These chapters glow with painterly images of windblown landscapes and picturesque vegetarian food, e.g., a "sweet potato gashed richly open" on a plate. How glad I am when Una hits puberty and ditches her warm, wonderful family for a couple of sailors, Kit and Giles. She cuts her hair, dresses as a boy, and secretly follows the guys aboard the whaler they've shipped with. Between trysts with them (they quickly see through her disguise) Una gives us a full report on the whaling life until the ship sinks and the crew is cast adrift. She and her friends survive by eating the flesh of shipmates who succumb, and after their rescue they are haunted by memories of their cannibalism. Giles commits suicide, Kit goes mad, and Una weds the madman. Una's eventual union with her second husband Ahab is less convincing. As she wanders the Nantucket dunes during one of her dark nights of the soul, a flinty hand silently leads her to safety before its anonymous owner slips away. Was that Ahab? Must be! Later she hears him wail "Una! Obsession!" into the flames of a house that's conveniently afire at the moment. Their passion is terrific, but when Ahab gives Una money to buy furniture, readers may feel that their memory of MOBY-DICK has been handed ashore dressed in a blouse and skirt. What Naslund does best is to portray a woman who joyously accepts the universe with the same unstinting ardor with which Ahab roars his everlasting "No!" Una's bliss is irrepressible, obstreperous, steeping random moments in its wayward shimmer. But the bold feminism so many reviewers praise in our heroine is rather compromised by her tendency to drop her emotional anchor next to every eligible or fatherly male who sails into her waters - first Giles, then Kit, then Captain Fry, Ahab, Isaac Starbuck, Judge Lord, Robben Avalon, and finally Ishmael. Nor is Una particularly scrupulous in ethical quandaries; her moral reflections on deceiving her friend Charlotte are only cathartic rationalizations after the fact. Finally, as a storyteller she doesn't measure up to the narrator of MOBY-DICK. Melville's Ishmael is as whole-hearted as Una, but half-sure, too, mingling meditation, wonder, affection, and horror in an ironically multiple vision. Una has only one purpose at a time in mind, so although her purposes change like the weather, her story achieves variety merely, not ambiguity or true complexity. She just wants (and wants us) to live, love, laugh and be happy. AHAB'S WIFE will attract fans of popular fiction - a woman at last month's Northwest Bookfest told Naslund the book "felt comfortable the whole way." But Naslund seems to be aiming at a different audience - one that's familiar with the authors she continually evokes: Chaucer, Cervantes, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Goethe, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Bronte, Keats, Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Douglass and ' Melville. Her novel's best achievement may be to return readers to its origins.
Rating: 
Summary: National Bestseller?? Not.
Review: I am on page 80 of this book.. and the worm is turning on my interest. Could someone tell me who made this a national bestseller? When the author puts Una as saying..."my father ... my name", then I know for sure how pretentious this book really is. The author tries to create her book in the style of Melville..and it fails.. only the gorgeous engraved illustrations(reminding me of Rockwell Kent's illustrations in a earlier version of Moby Dick) are stunning..Certainly not the characters or the heart of this book.. I'm going to put it down.. unless someone can convince me otherwise... ....
Rating: 
Summary: Couldn't put this book down!
Review: I really enjoyed the characters and story in this book. I also thought the writing style was for the most part excellent and filled with memorable passages. I agree with some of the criticisms about it being a bit preachy in parts, but the main focus of the story was so enjoyable that it more then compensated any shortcomings. I would highly recommend this book even if you are not particularly interested in the ocean or whaling.
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Summary: The Book that Could Have Been
Review: If you look at the book as a whole, with certain parts taken out, it was a wonderful narrative of the life of Ahab's wife. Unfortunately, the author put in segments that took the character out of the historical period and placed Ahab's wife into the 21st century. It was not so much the changing of historical times that was troubling, it was that the author did not evole those historical changes to make them always seemlessly "fit in". It felt that in order to make it more interesting to a wider range of audience, she threw in some issues and developments of the 21st century. Some issues were given a short paragraph and life went on. Near the end of the book, I started guessing as to what the new development would be. (My guess was right!) If the historical add-ins were deleted or seemlessly meshed in, it would have been a better rated book. If you can get over those errors and LOVE the ocean - read it. P.S. Sometimes I like to pick up an old classic to read or re-read, and I know it won't be Moby Dick for a long time - the poor fellow!
Rating:
Summary: Flawed but long and enjoyable
Review: Una has a long interesting life, some of which involves being Ahab's wife, which makes for a novel that, despite its length, I wanted more of. Who did not wonder what life had in store for Una and her third "husband"? The novel is flawed--too preachy (ills of slavery, religion, antifeminism, homosexuality), too flowery (the initial verse on her pregnacy loss almost lost me too), too obsessed with "famous folk of the time" (Emerson et al)--but she was so interesting and the novel so full of detail about whaling life in the 1800's, that I was disappointed when it ended on the cusp of her new "marriage". This novel is not a true work of literature, but I did find it truly enjoying. It is not Moby Dick, but I did find this "account" of Ahab's wife moving and provoking. I thought it was truly an enjoyable read, despite its flaws..and I cannot say that for many novels. I look forward to the author writing again with less preaching and more focusing for a truly wonderful novel.
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Summary: Step into this courageous woman's world
Review: This is an unfolding story of a woman's life and quest to find her authentic self. She bucks the traditional way of life of a mid 1850's female. It reminded me very much of "Daughter of Fortune" which was similar in that the female lead character charts her own course and blazes a trail toward redefining a woman's role in society and her search to find herself.
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Summary: Thank You Naysayers!
Review: I thought I was losing it as I wrestled to finish this book. Logged on to Amazon just to see what you all had to say about it. I was semi-smitten for the first 200 pages and since it's 666 (interesting number) long, I sincerely wanted it to be a great book. Soon I started saying "what?" quite often. Finally I realized that I really didn't like Una, nor did I care very much about her. One of my favorite irritating moments is the pie-baking episode with Frannie on p. 608 when it looked like it would be a "touching" reunion until Una bolts for the beach to begin her tome on a grain of sand. What??? Shakespeare she is not!! But she makes it back for a piece of pie. Everything reminded Una of something or someone else (Ch. 155). As someone pointed out, there were endless, poetic but often tedious ruminations of insignificant moments or scenes, while important events and happenings were glossed over and/or left incomplete. What??? Did you love her comments on Robben and the Judge's homosexual relationship? And, the needle, what's the significance of the needle as it too crops up in several strange and inappropriate places? I am disappointed. I'm wary when an author takes a snippet from a masterpiece and decides to do a spin-off. In my opinion, this book was too much, too many, too long! It had potential, it fell far short. Blame the author, blame the editor, whomever, we deserved better. I just wish my book club had selected Melville's original. Perhaps that's the answer....back to the classics!!
Rating:
Summary: A great read!
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found the time in my hectic schedule to plow through it. As with SP Somtow's "The Shattered Horse", I find it intriguing that such an elaborte, well-designed and interesting story can be based only on a single line of prose from another literary work.
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