And the Ocean Was Our Sky by Patrick Ness

The newest entry in a series that sits proudly in second place on the ALA’s list of Most Banned/Challenged titles of the 21st century (behind Harry) takes its insecure but sensible 17-year-old narrator through her final semester of high school.Īlice navigates past such fixed points as Senior Prom, Prank Day and graduation as well as more personal triumphs and tribulations, from getting one of those flat business envelopes from her first-choice college to finding out that her boyfriend Patrick will be spending the next year in Spain. Wrenching, dark, and powerful-no fluke, considering its model. The story, though far shorter than its progenitor, conjures similar allegorical weight by pairing the narrative’s rolling cadences with powerful, shadowy illustrations featuring looming whales, an upside-down ship in full sail, and swarms of red-eyed sharks, all amid dense swirls of water and blood. But the reflective narrator catches profound glimpses of how destructive implacable mutual hatred can be to both body and soul as her captain’s obsessive search for the white ship of the universally feared Toby Wick leads through massacres and chancy encounters to a melodramatic confrontation. Alexandra, who bears the stub of a harpoon in her head, in ramming ships to splinters. Having seen her own mother ambushed and torn to pieces, Bathsheba eagerly joins Capt. In a conflict that has raged for millennia, both sides wield harpoons and store their savagely dismembered opponents in wooden hulls for transport. Along with telling the tale from a young whale’s point of view, he reverses the usual orientation of the universe so that cetacean crews go down to meet their enemies at the threshold where oceans give way to the deep, unknowable Abyss of air. Ness ( Release, 2017, etc.) mines Moby Dick for incidents and motifs, pitting men against whales in a futuristic alternate world. An ancient war draws to a climax as a vengeful-and literally hard-nosed-sea captain seeks out a demonic killer.

And the Ocean Was Our Sky by Patrick Ness