This book is separated into four different parts. Each part has a different narrator. The first part, narrated by Evangeline, begins in Nantucket in 1849. I got sucked into the story immediately because it reminded me of one of my all-time favorite books, Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund. It brought me back to Ahab and his ship Pequod and his fevered hunt for the big white whale. (Yes, I have read Moby Dick too, but didn't like it nearly as much!)
Evangeline is the matriarch of the family that follows. Evangeline ends up on Nantucket as a young woman and marries a tavern owner, Hosea Hussey. Unfortunately, Hosea dies early in their marriage. Lost at sea. She takes over running the tavern, pretending that Hosea isn't dead. Even when she gets pregnant by a sailor, Ishmael, who stops briefly in Nantucket before joining the fated Pequod and its mission, she continues to allow the townspeople to act like her daughter is Hosea's child. Her daughter, Rachel, is devastated when she realizes that Hosea cannot be her father.
Part two is Rachel's voice. She takes over the story in 1856. When she discovers that Hosea could not be her father, she becomes obsessed with Ishmael. She does whatever it takes to find out information about him. She suspects that he is still alive because she sees a story written in a paper out of Boston that tells familiar stories related to Nantucket, Ahab's ship, and her mother, simply with different names. She eventually uses her special power (a tad different than the special power that Evangeline has of being able to "track" people and command them to do her bidding). Rachel forces her mother to forget that she has a daughter and then escapes to Boston to find the newspaper that publishes Ishmael's stories.
Rachel ends up marrying the publisher of the newspaper and they have a daughter, who they name Mara. Mara narrates part three. She is only two years old when her mother decides to leave her husband to chase after Ishmael. At the last minute, she brings Mara with her. The ship is torn apart in a storm, which causes Rachel's death. Mara is taken to an old, dilapidated nunnery, and is raised by a couple of nuns. She falls in love at 16 with a young man training to be a priest. When the young man is forced to reject her upon the arrival of the Bishop, she flees with her fellow orphan, Otavia.
Part four begins in 1900 and is the voice of Mara's daughter, Antonia, aka Annie. The obsession of finding Ishmael continues, even though none of them, except Evangeline, even really knows who he is. Annie does her own research and thinks that Ishmael is in London. She makes secret plans to go to London. Her mother stops her and moves her to Moscow, Idaho. Annie is angry at her mother for years. She saves money until she is 17 years old and resumes her plan to escape to London.
The book's final chapter is set in Nantucket in 1905, with Evangeline once again the narrator. We finally find out what happened to her after Rachel put the "forgetting curse" on her. There are a lot of layers of emotion throughout the stories of these four women. They are all four determined and persistent. They each make some poor choices, but did the best they could, knowing what they knew at the time, I guess. I really enjoyed the journey.
Wendy's Rating: *****
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