And the Ocean Was Our Sky

Patrick Ness follows up his conceptual 2017 young adult novel, Release, with the esoteric, artful And the Ocean Was Our Sky, a (literal) upside-down retelling of Moby Dick. "Call me Bathsheba," Ness's narrator begins, here to tell her tale of "the final hunt that ever was. The hunt for a legend, a myth, a devil."
 
When she was 16, Bathsheba was a hunter, a "lowly but eager Third Apprentice" to Captain Alexandra, "the best hunter in the sea." The Captain had a "short, rusted end of a man's harpoon... sticking from her great head," physical and painful proof of man's long war with whales. Bathsheba was, as she puts it, "ignorant" when she hunted with Captain Alexandra, their "sails catching the currents, the Abyss below [them], the ocean [their] sky." Bathsheba knew that man and whale were enemies, and that was all that mattered.
 
But then a routine hunt went awry, the man ship they sought found empty and adrift, its crew dead. All, that is, except one young man with a message: "He is uncatchable." Captain Alexandra had found the trail of Toby Wick--the whales' "devil," "monster," "myth"--and his white ship, and nothing would stop her from following it.
 
Bathsheba's story has heft, even though Ness's book is significantly shorter than Melville's. The questions she raises as she slowly sheds her ignorance are deep, the trauma faced by both man and whale brutal and wholly unnecessary. Rovina Cai's illustrations are detailed and dream-like, her gray-scale with splashes of color depictions of the fathomless world an additional source of intensity in this already fierce tale. Readers are likely to leave And the Ocean Was Our Sky asking the same kinds of heavy questions as Bathsheba, primary among them, "who needs devils when you have men?" --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness
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