I have not read Moby Dick, only a summary of the plot after reading this retelling. Call me Ishmaelle seems like it is more interesting in the context of modern times, although the high level plot progression is very similar.

The premise of a female Ishmael was very intriguing, as was her perspective as part of the whaling ship crew. I enjoyed her musings on the disadvantages of being a female and lack of freedom during that time period, how gender is treated in nature, and how she herself wished to be identified in terms of gender.

And while the blurb seems to imply this is a queer retelling (and the word queer is used almost excessively), this is more about the feminine viewpoint. But I felt like more could have been done with the idea. There is also snippets of race and discrimination, but they are almost like afterthoughts.

What I wish was covered more was the "mysterious bond" between Ishmaelle and the whale. It's hinted at, but unclear to me what that bond is. Maybe just highlighting how women are less violent and not always seeking to kill anything? Which I find to be an overdone idea in books to a certain extent.

I could have also done with less of of the I-Ching and the hexagrams, which I guess were replacing the prophesies from Fedellah in the original. But they were confusing and I didn't even try to understand whatever symbolism they were meant to represent.

Anyway, worth a read whether you have read/enjoyed Moby Dick in the past or not.

Full disclaimer, I have not actually read Herman Melville's Moby Dick. However, I know the story and I appreciated this novel all the same. I loved the gender bending aspect and the outcome of the story. This reminded me of a book I once read called "Pope Joan" which did a similar thing. Ishmaelle is a character I found easy to love and I rooted for her in all her endeavors. I also especially liked the sound effects the author included in the story.

Herman Melville's Moby Dick is a whale of a book, no pun intended. Xiaolu Guo takes a post-colonial, feminist slant on the classic. I found my prior read of Melville to be of some enhancement to the story, but not necessary - this is a stand-up story on its own. The introduction of more cultures and religion along with Ishmaelle being a woman hiding as a man updates the novel.

The violence of the story is not glossed over in this retelling.

I would've like some fleshing out of some aspects but im also very appreciative it's not as lobg-winded and dry as the original.

Interesting reimagining/retelling of Moby Dick - reminded me of the concept behind Demon Copperhead, but the female protagonist makes it feel softer, more considered and almost philosophical at times. Thought-provoking read!

A re-write of Moby Dick - I was drawn to this book by it appearing in Booker Prize Prediction lists from some of the most respected names on Booktube/Bookstagam (and even Radio 4).

And there is a lot to be said for the book’s chances (or at least for the fact that its very likely to have ben under consideration by the judges) – perhaps more than the tippers realised – as one judge in particular, Chris Power, not just proclaimed Moby Dick “one of the greatest – if not the greatest – novels ever written” (in a review incidentally of a non-fiction review of its writing named after the book’s famous first line “Call Me Ishmael” by Charles Olson) but was a judge on the Goldsmith Prize in 2020 when Xiaolu Guo’s “A Lover’s Discourse” was shortlisted with Power himself – who called it an essayistic novel – providing the judges’ commendation.

Guo’s novel opens some 10 years later than Melville’s novel was published (and some 20 years after the first hand experience on which it was based) – a deliberate decision to include the early stages of the America Civil War as background to include the American racial tension missing from the original.

It also opens instead of America on the South Coast of England – not Hastings where Guo spent a year writing (and penned a memoir) but the Kent Coast – a decision I was less clear on other than to give her space to write her main character – a teenage girl orphaned early on in the novel and deciding to head to sea and America, in hopeful pursuit of a father-replacement figure – an New York sea captain who had showed her some kindness (although on board the ship where she has taken a job she hears talk of the whaling ships).

As an aside I think a lot of my issues with the novel arose very early on – even from the titular first three words. In Melville’s original many readers I think would assume that “Call me Ishmael” means precisely that that character’s name was originally something else, the names instead a signifier of his outcast/banishment/wanderer (but also protected) status. Here though the protagonist is called Ishmaelle after her father had assumed the unborn baby was a boy – introducing of course Guo’s other main twist, a female whaler. But the father picked the name Ishmael “after the son of Abraham from the old bible” – which seems a pretty odd choice to me – at least without some comment - for a bible fearing Christian father and signalled to me, accurately, that the old Testament imagery which underpins the original was deliberately – but for me very regrettably – lost here.

And that loss of linguistic antecedents also extends to the Shakespearian influences of the original – the language here (written of course in the author’s second language) much much simpler – again for me regrettably so that when the two stories do overlap there are times with almost identical scenes when I felt like I was reading a Readers Digest Condensed or even “Shakespeare-made-easy” version of the novel.

When Ishmaelle reaches New York – her dreams are dashed and she indeed finds herself drawn to whaling and heading for Nantucket, and for the first real time the two texts (as an aside there are free Kindle versions of Moby Dick available and I would recommend having one open when reading this novel) strongly coincide (sometimes I felt to an artificial sense) as we read Mr O’Malley had told me, when we were still on the Atlantic, that New Bedford had monopolised the business of whaling, but that Nantucket was the great original whaling town. which is a slightly rewritten version (sans classical reference) of the original “Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original— the Tyre of this Carthage;—the place where the first dead American whale was stranded”

And from there much of the story – at least until the ship is at sea – is a close copy of the original (Ishmael for example spending the night sharing a room with a Pacific Ocean harpooner/harpoonist – Kauri but rather than Queeueg) with only names changed but not just general narrative but at times side-details exactly reproduced.

And this is where I think this rewrite of a classic American novel falls someway short of another more famous recent one – Percival Everett’s James, as whereas from the very first scene of that novel the original narrative is undermined and turned around (with James’s code switching vocabulary and behaviour) here this almost feels like just a translation (into simpler English) and distillation of the original.

Instead the names and backgrounds of the characters are changed – not just Ishmaelle but for example with Captain Seneca of the Nimrod replacing the Captain Ahab of the Pequod, but with more importantly Seneca being a freed black ex-slave.

The Seneca character works well I think – a back story involving his wife dying in childbirth after giving birth to another man’s white child gives a further motivation as well as a nice link to the white whale.

Ishmaelle being female works I think less well – early on it seems to largely consist of little more than her having to avoid changing/washing/going to the toilet in public and dealing with her monthly periods; an assault does occur (as I believe typically happened with sailors discovered to be female) the assaulter assumed he was raping a man. And later I felt that Guo could not quite decide if she was writing a novel with musings/reflections on female/maternal versus male characteristics or on gender fluidity and perhaps as a result did not really gave a satisfactory treatment to either.

And another very change – to bring in Tao beliefs and in particular I-Ching Hexagrams – taking over – while I think well intentioned and also sensibly building out the original (from the slightly odd Fedallah character in Moby Dick) – was not really to my tastes at all, particularly when compared to the loss of Biblical imagery; but of course this very de-Westernisation of a canonical Western text was precisely what the author aimed for and I think in this case she did achieve what she set out to do.

And these Hexagrams for me rather ruined what was otherwise a well written finale.

I have to say while a book I enjoyed reading, I also found it slightly underwhelming and I am not sure how the Booker judges will react (Power for example I believe particularly loving the very expansiveness and depth and over the top prose of both Melville’s text and Olson’s which it seems to me is precisely what is lost in Guo’s re-fictionalisation.

My thanks to Grove Atlantic for an ARC via NetGalley

I thought this was fun from a woman’s point of view and also the race and gender bending that change the plot of moby dick. The passages were captivating and I enjoyed the dynamics and explorations of various dynamics based on so many different factors.

Thanks for the ARC.

Call Me Ismaelle stands out as an enjoyable example of a "write back." The gender bending, the suspense created even though the ending is known, the interesting characters, and the surprising situations make the book an enjoyable read. For high school students who often don't enjoy reading Moby Dick itself, this book would work as an "antidote."

This was a poignant novel following the life of Ishmaelle as she disguised herself as a man to move through the sea-faring world. It was well-researched in regard to whaling—the sailing, hunting, and harvesting process. I found that very intriguing.
I don’t usually advocate for “trigger warnings” but this novel did contain numerous graphic scenes of sexual assault that seemed to come out of nowhere. Some readers may find this distressing. I suppose the point was to further emphasize Ishmaelle being a woman no matter what clothes she wore, but it seemed unnecessary to stress her physical gender as each chapter typically ended on that note anyway.
However, overall, this was an interesting take on Moby Dick, rife with questions of gender, race, and even species (there are some scenes from the perspective of a whale). 3.5 stars.

Call Me Ishmaelle is a poetic, symbolic retelling of Moby-Dick from a female perspective. I haven’t read the original classic, so I can’t speak to how closely this parallels Melville’s work—but it’s clear the author was aiming for something deeply reflective.

I was really intrigued by the concept—a gender-swapped narrator and a quieter, more introspective approach to such a well-known story. The writing itself had a poetic rhythm at times, and I could appreciate the philosophical lens through which life at sea was portrayed.

That said, parts of this didn’t fully land for me. Characters were introduced late and sometimes felt like they were just… there, without really adding anything meaningful. The fragmented sentence style—while likely meant to reflect internal thought or emotional disconnection—pulled me out of the story more than it drew me in. And the pacing early on was slow. Ishmaelle’s backstory took a while to get through, and I think it could have been tightened without losing impact.

While the novel clearly pays tribute to Moby-Dick with its sea-bound reflections and layered symbolism, many of the more poetic interludes felt disconnected from the main story. I kept waiting for things to build toward something intense or moving, but the emotional payoff felt flat.

Still, this might resonate more with readers who enjoy experimental prose and reflective storytelling. It wasn’t quite for me—but I do think it tried to do something unique.

Call Me Ishmaelle is magnificent. It was what I needed to read after a surfeit of smaller, calmer stories. Xiaolu Guo is new to me, and I requested the ARC purely based on the title. I came away feeling lucky to have stumbled upon this novel and to have added a writer I’d not yet encountered to my TBR list.
A grieving Ishmaelle goes to Nantucket to sign on to a whaling ship; in an inn, she meets Kauri, a harpooner covered in tattoos. Sound familiar? It might, if you read Melville’s Moby Dick. From there, though, the parallels are shifted more and more; I was put in mind of maps of the same place made hundreds of years apart.
Xiaolu Guo’s writing is precise, clear, and immersive. I love finding a novel that fits like a cloche, warm and snug. I reveled in the way the story was both strange and familiar, and recommend it to anyone who loved Moby Dick but also wondered “what if…?” or imagined themself into the story but didn’t quite fit. Ishmaelle fits, there are no rough edges; this book is quiet and quick, the story and what Guo does with Ishmaelle are a triumph of stealthy legerdemain.
The added layers of Ishmaelle keeping herself secure on a ship of men, of Ishmaelle forming relationships far more nuanced than those of Melville’s Ishmael, and of the captain - a Captain Seneca of the whaling ship Nimrod - are beautiful. Call Me Ishmaelle spars with the same matters as Moby Dick in so many ways: ideology, philosophy, friendship, the disguises we wear, and the ways of stubborn single mindedness; this is exactly what prompts me to read any and all literary fan fiction I can find: the rare discovery of a book as good as this one.
I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is what a perfect book supposed to be , the title had caught my attention and the preview was the key to request call me Ishmaelle but god only knows how much this affected me to my bones

I've never read Herman Melville's classic or even watched the film and I think you really need to have read or watched it in order to really appreciate this book. With that in mind I have ordered a copy of the "classic" to read in tandem with a re-read of "Call me Ishmaelle".

The story begins Saxonham, Kent 1843. Ishmaelle with her parents dead , only brother now a sailor and the final tie to home her dependent baby sisters death she has few options for survival, reinventing herself as Ishmael crossing the Atlantic as a ships cabin boy to Nantucket in America, the Whaling Capital of the World. Whales and their oil being vital and lucrative part of everyday life for many centuries.
The story unfolds at a leisurely pace, much like the days spent before the crew of the Nimrod spot whales, (a matter of patient observation and luck as I found while on a cruise across the Atlantic to Newfoundland & Labrador whale hunting with a camera rather a harpoon.)
Captain Seneca and other key characters, atmosphere, environment and harsh reality of a whalers life and their ship are vividly drawn and brought to life.
The books focus is Seneca's hunt for the white whale that chewed his leg off, played out against themes of conflict and discrimination of race, religion, gender.

I was very intrigued by the plot of this book. It sounded like it would be something that I would really enjoy. I did enjoy parts of it. Ishmaelle was interesting, adventurous and determined, I loved her spirit. I flew through the first half of the book, it was gripping and I liked where it was going. The second half of the book, dragged on and I struggled with it. The final battles, the pace picked up again and I was able to finish it.

Overall a good story, but it could have been 70-80 pages less and it would have kept the pace up, and my interest a little more sustained.

Blending autofiction, feminist critique, and literary reinvention, this bold reimagining of Moby-Dick follows a disenchanted Chinese writer navigating motherhood, migration, and creative obsession in a post-Brexit London.

Plot & Themes:
A Writer’s Whale Hunt: The unnamed protagonist (a stand-in for Guo herself) grapples with artistic stagnation while raising a child in London. When she stumbles upon a rare edition of Moby-Dick in a charity shop, she becomes fixated on rewriting Herman Melville’s epic—but from the perspective of the whale, reframing Ahab’s madness as a metaphor for patriarchal and colonial violence.

Motherhood vs. Art: The novel interrogates the tension between creative ambition and maternal duty, asking: Can a woman be both Ishmael and the whale?

Diaspora Dislocation: Guo’s signature themes of cultural alienation resurface as the narrator dissects British racism, Brexit xenophobia, and her own “perpetual foreignness.”

Climate Grief: The whale’s perspective evokes ecological collapse, drawing parallels between Ahab’s hunt and humanity’s exploitation of nature.

Style & Structure:
Metafictional Play: The text oscillates between the narrator’s life, her fragmented “whale manuscript,” and sardonic footnotes deconstructing Melville.

Multilingual Puns: Guo’s protagonist mangles English idioms (echoing Dictionary for Lovers) while code-switching between Mandarin and Cockney slang.

Autofictional Edge: Real-life details—Guo’s filmmaking career, her 2023 memoir Radical: A Life of My Own—blur with fiction.

Call Me Ishmaelle, Xiaolu Guo's postcolonial take on Herman Melville's Moby Dick, turns Ishmael into a cross-dressing heroine who flees tragedy by taking to the high seas. Readers of Moby Dick will be familiar with many of the places Ishmaelle (her father wanted a boy) lands and with the international cast of characters—names and backgrounds have been changed—she meets on board the Nimrod. The ship is helmed by the maniacal sea captain, Seneca, a black-indigenous man chasing the white whale who devoured his leg, and sanity, on a previous journey. Guo’s spin on Captain Ahab is a provocative one.

Guo's novel is a fantastical, witchy-feminist (a popular genre these days) take on a classic, and in many ways it works. Although the names have been changed, the crew are more than expendable bodies charged with lighting the homes of the wealthy at home—they've joined the crew for freedom, adventure, survival, and escape, and their stories are fascinating and diverse. Like Ishmaelle, they are seeking refuge from an increasingly unstable world where precarity and extraction have made everyday life untenable. America's on the brink of the Civil War, islands around the world are being threatened by pirates, and colonial powers are hellbent on extracting natural resources, and human beings, without care. The seas, while treacherous, offer the only freedom many of the Nimrod’s crew have ever known.

In addition to the teenage, cross-dressing Ishmael/Ishmaelle, Guo’s novel shares Melville’s fascination with history, geography, the nuances—and violence--of whaling, and life on the seas. Told in the first person, we viscerally experience rape, starvation, the boredom and precarity of a sailor’s life, and the darkness at the heart of the whaling industry. At a time when mankind is facing an increasingly unstable climate, rising fascism, and a future marred by sins of the past, Call Me Ishmaelle is a timely contribution to the literary canon.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to review an ARC of Call Me Ishmaelle. And many thanks to Xiaolu Guo for writing a novel that found me rereading, and rethinking, Moby Dick (and planning a trip to Nantucket next year).

It seems that there is a bit of a trend recently for books retelling the stories of classics in one way or another - James, Demon Copperhead and Hagseed all spring to mind. Especially if you know the original, these books can be a great read. It is quite some years since I read Moby Dick, but I still remembered enough to make Call me Ishmaelle well worthwhile. Actually, I suppose it is still worth reading even if you don't know the 'original', Guo takes care to inform the new (or forgetful) reader what is going on without the need to refer to Moby Dick. However, I am sure that at least a passing acquaintance will deepen the experience. Guo also addresses the motivation of the whalers, "I wondered if the whole venture was about something other than money. Was it something in the heart of men?", and the parallels with modern capitalism are easily drawn and interesting to think about. She convincingly describes what it must have been like to work on a whaling ship. My grandfather was a deep sea fisherman and I heard that he at one time worked on a whaler (albeit getting on a century later than this book), so this story has particular personal relevance for me.
The most obvious novel aspect of this retelling is that it is written from the perspective of a junior sailor, which is interesting. However, what really gives it depth is that the sailor, Ishmaelle, is a woman (a young girl really) and in fact we discover that she is a little gender-fluid, not really sure of her sexual identity. It is quite a challenge to bring that off convincingly from the perspective of a 19th century protagonist, but Guo brings that off rather convincingly.
If you are interested either in historical novels or in gender identity, I would definitely recommend reading this book, and the combination makes for an entertaining read.

This review was made using an advance review copy kindly provided by the publisher via Netgalley in return for an honest review.

I enjoyed this retelling of a classic. Ishmaelle sought her way in a world that left her few options. I admired her spirit and strength throughout. It’s been a long time since I read Melville’s Moby Dick so the story seemed fresh and interesting with the new twists but it did lag in a few areas. Overall it was worth reading and held my interest but die hard fans of the original may find this version a little too “woke”.

Thanks to Grove Atlantic for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

I recently had the idea to reread Moby Dick, which I hadn't read since high school, but I ended up reading this instead. While I probably missed a lot of the allusions, I enjoyed this retelling. The highlight for me was definitely Ishmaelle's journey with gender: what it means to her to be a woman, to take up the life of a man, and to connect with nature through womanhood. I would recommend this to readers of reflective, diverse historical fiction and those looking for gender-expansive characters.

Content warnings: rape, animal death and cruelty

You’ve heard of ‘No Fear Shakespeare’! Now introducing: ‘No Fun, Less Well Done, What The Hell(ville)? Melville’. Listen – I tried hard to love this book, and if not to love it than respect it. I am a big big fan of Moby Dick. I have to assume the author of Call Me Ishmaelle is too.

But unfortunately: I didn’t enjoy this at all. I’ve rounded up to 2 stars but really in terms of my enjoyment it sits at about a 1.5. And retellings and reimagining are always complicated business for me: there has to be the exact right balance of something old / something new. It has to capture the spirit of the original and simultaneously transform it, in form or style or perspective, to tell a new story.

And I felt like that balance was not pulled off here. For the first three chapters, it introduced an English girl, swiftly orphaned and almost alone in the world: it bore very little resemblance to Moby Dick, but I was enjoying it in its own right! And then, Ishmaelle... goes to New Bedford. Why? Well, mostly because Melville’s narrative dictates it, I guess – that’s the starting point of his story, and so our Ishmaelle is buffeted along by the winds of fate or the puppet strings of Moby Dick, stuck in the long shadow of the narrative that came before because ??? I don’t know. Why would this English Ishmaelle not go whaling in the North sea or something instead? Why do the rest of the events of the plot unfold as they do, in Moby Dick’s very particular beats? It just never feels driven by the characters in quite the same way here.

And if the plot is hardly ‘reimagined’, the rest of the characters aren’t either. Names are changed, and Ahab’s background is slightly altered, but essentially Queequeg becomes Kauri, Starbuck becomes Drake, etc: the off-brand stock versions of themselves. Guo’s additions to the original are: a little more political correctness in describing race and religion, although the diversity is not new; a new focus on Taoism, with Muzi’s character, which I liked and thought WAS inventive!!; and the gender-swapped main character, along with some added rape.

I have already read a fair few books of women/non-binary/genderfluid/trans men running away to sea to explore their gender (e.g. I read that Mary Read retelling just last year; Ally Wilkes’ All The White Spaces has a trans MC), and while I DO like a ship as a cool microcosm of a setting for it, the execution of this gender exploration here really didn’t sit well with me?? It all felt oddly bioessentialist and reductive? Her womanhood is usually considered in regard to her period; being penetrated; collecting herbs for healing purposes; being surrounded by a world of violent men. By the end, Ahab is calling her a witch. And yes, this all aligns Ishmaelle with the white whale – hunted, harpooned, mystical. Maybe I’m missing her point. Maybe that was the point?

No, I’m not done yet. Let’s talk about the writing, why don’t we? I would love to say Guo is a good writer (particularly as I think English is her second language)... but it’s hard to fucking tell!!! Here is where the novel again cleaves too closely to the original: almost every time I actively enjoyed the cadence of a sentence or a thought or a funny line, it wasn’t one of Guo’s. It was cribbed directly from Melville. SO MUCH of this novel – the full trajectory of the plot, and whole sentences and paragraphs and scenes – is just a condensed and simplified rewriting of Melville,. (I ended up essentially reading them in tandem, pages side by side.) So all the character and humour and eccentricity and philosophy is often more to Melville’s credit than Guo’s, which is kind of disappointing, because again: where is the imagination in the reimagining? I liked that Guo kept the moments of eccentric experimentation with form and style – that felt like a homage to Melville without just being a word-for-word reproduction – but I also wish she had let Ishmaelle breathe a little on her own whaling quest instead.

So in the end I felt like this version actually lost more of the magic of Moby Dick than it gained in the reimagining. And I might be in the minority (and maybe if you hated Moby Dick this is a better book for you), but I’d rather read the original any day.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

The story follows Ishmaelle, who grows up in a small village on the windy Kent coast, swimming with dolphins. After losing her family, she disguises herself as a cabin boy to pursue a life at sea and makes her way to New York.

When the American Civil War breaks out, she boards the Nimrod, a whaling ship led by the troubled Captain Seneca. Amid the chaos of whaling, Ishmaelle finds unexpected allies in her diverse crew and forms a mysterious bond with a white whale that changed Seneca's life.
I loved this story, actually more than Melville's. I may be a bit biased, as a female. I could feel myself in the story..
Highly recommend.