Julie Gerstenblatt
"A lyrical and beautiful work of historical fiction.… Charming and atmospheric, Wild and Distant Seas celebrates the complexities of womanhood through the ages and poses questions about memory, family identity, one’s legacy, and the nature and power of free will. What stories do we inherit and how much can we alter the narrative of our lives and of those of our loved ones? And when is it time to let go? At its heart, this is a story of loss, redemption, tenacity, and hope."
Oprah Daily - Charley Burlock
"With language richer than the matriarch’s famed chowder and nautical descriptions so vivid you can taste the salt spray, Roberts offers a new and refreshingly feminine perspective on one of American literature’s most masculine classics."
Bookreporter - Jane Siciliano
"Reading this book is like exploring history with a whole new perspective.... With a terse yet poetic style that calls to mind the prose of Hawthorne and Melville, Roberts brings this story to life with a quiet energy and yearning that is palpable.... A beautiful book."
Christian Science Monitor - Heller McAlpin
"Beautifully conceived.... An inventive, atmospheric, female-centric story.... Ingeniously constructed.... Like whales, Roberts’ novel traverses great distances, following its four generations of resolute women as they strive to take the helm of their lives.... [A] stirring epic."
Historical Novel Society - Beth Kanell
"Marvelous.… Grounded in the small passionate details of the great Melville novel, yet seeking meaning in a very different way.… [T]his luscious novel may open a longing to re-explore the tale of the whale and the men who pursued it."
Ruth Emmie Lang
"Tara Karr Roberts breathes new life into a classic tale with a radiant cast of women at the helm. Wholly absorbing and beautifully written, Wild and Distant Seas is sure to someday be a classic in its own right."
Patricia Smith
"Sweeping.… The magic is subtle, woven seamlessly into the narrative, so it does not feel out of place in this otherwise traditional work of historical fiction. Each woman’s story builds to a beautiful conclusion, and the themes of love, motherhood, and the quest to find one’s purpose in life resonate throughout."
Kirkus Reviews
2023-10-07
A Nantucket widow inherits an inn, and three generations of women succeed her.
Evangeline Hussey’s husband has been dead for a couple of years when two strangers show up at her Nantucket inn requesting a place to stay. One “wore the outfit of a sailor, yet when he clasped my hand in his, I felt the soft, unmarred skin of a boy from the city,” Evangeline says. “He said I should call him Ishmael.” This cringeworthy moment is not the first hint that Roberts has used the characters and plot of Moby-Dick to undergird her debut novel—but it is the clearest, made with all the subtlety of a piano played by a baseball bat. Hussey’s novel follows four generations of women who descend from Evangeline, but why she chose to root the tale in Melville’s work isn’t entirely clear. Without the references to Ishmael, Captain Ahab, et al., Roberts would have had a finely detailed piece of historical fiction on her hands, well researched and rich. She is a natural storyteller and her prose is engaging. But Melville is doing her no favors here. Nor are the magical threads woven through the story. Evangeline, it turns out, had a gift—she could see the recent memories of those around her—which her daughter, Rachel, inherits in her own way. Rachel has been given the power of suggestion and, simply by speaking, can convince those around her to bend to her will. All of this, taken together, feels rather like a smoke screen that hides the novel’s real action. What’s actually happening here? It doesn’t look like Roberts could decide, so she threw everything in.
Proceeding in fits and starts, this novel feels chaotic and poorly conceptualized.
