And it’s a delight!
The novel opens in 1849 on Nantucket Island. Evangeline Hussey has a psychic gift that she keeps a secret: She can see people’s recent memories. And one day when her fisherman husband, Hosea, doesn’t come home, she knows exactly what happened to him because she can see it in her mind. He fell off his boat and drowned. New to the island, Evangeline’s marriage to Hosea was not viewed with approval by his large family and many friends, so she realizes she must do something drastic in order to keep hold of the Try Pots Inn they ran together, her only form of livelihood. Her bizarre plan works…for several years. And one day a man named Ishmael arrives on the doorstep of the inn, asking for a room and bowl of chowder. Before long, Ishmael is sharing Evangeline’s bed. On Christmas morning, he and his buddy Queequeg ship out on the Pequod with the eccentric Captain Ahab, but he has left Evangeline a parting gift: She is pregnant.
Her little girl, Rachel, grows up saucy and sassy with a psychic gift of her own. She can place spells (which she calls “curses”) on people forcing them either to remember something or to forget it. Rachel is nine years old when she learns about the mysterious Ishmael and is determined to find out who is. One day, she reads a column about whaling adventures in a Boston newspaper and realizes the author is her father, Ishmael. Rachel travels to Boston in search of him, but it’s not easy tracking down an itinerant sailor. The story continues with Rachel’s daughter, Mara, who has her own psychic gift: She not only vividly retains her own memories, even from very early childhood, but can sometimes see the darkest, most secret memories of other people. Mara’s daughter, Antonia, has an uncanny ability to envision other people’s paths and where they have been, seeing every stop along the way.
One thing all of the women have in common is the seemingly fruitless search for Ishmael because somehow, someway they believe it will lead them to family. This quest is what drives each of them, but secrets and lies—oh, so many lies—abound. Eventually, it is Mara and Antonia who realize the most important quest of all, and once those secrets are revealed and the truths divulged…well, let’s just say that I (really, truly) got goosebumps.
This ingeniously plotted novel jumps from Nantucket Island to Boston to Brazil to Italy to Idaho and back to Nantucket Island, and each stop in this unusual historical travelogue is filled with intrigue, hope, fear, and touch of magic as the age-old mystery of Ishmael continues to haunt this family through the generations.
This is a sweeping epic that is creative storytelling at its best.
