Chapter Twenty-Three: Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer

What an excellent novel!  As you may infer from the title, this book is very loosely based on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: Or, The Great White Whale, although I feel this novel by Sena Jeter Naslund can very easily be read and enjoyed without having read Hawthorne's whaling epic.  (I've read Moby-Dick, back in high school, but my memories of it are pretty vague, now.)  Anyway, to return to the excellence of Ahab's Wife, I thoroughly enjoyed this long, epic, fictional auto-biography of a woman mentioned only briefly in Moby-Dick.  I absolutely loved the titular character, Una--she is such a strong, resilient, and very real and human character.  She leads such a wondrous life, with both the thrills and terrors of adventures and the joys and sorrows of 19th-century domestic life.  I found it easy to immerse myself in her narration and become absorbed by her recounting of her life.  Moreover, in addition to this stellar narrator/main-character, the plot is fantastically paced, ebbing and flowing like the ocean that so permeates the book, encompassing both fast-paced plot twists and calmer, stiller moments of bliss, sorrow, and acceptance.  To top it all off, the writing itself is beautiful: it is delightfully reminiscent of the best aspects of 19th-century style while avoiding the less pleasant, harder-to-read aspects of it.  This is a fantastic novel, and it is well worth the time it takes to journey through this ultimately uplifting and affirming tale.