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.

For a book having over 400 pages, this was an absolute page turner. redefining MOBY DICK in the perspective of a girl who had to pretend like a boy, Xiaolu Guo has shown genuine respect to Herman Melville, creating an epic novel filled with adventure and literary genius. Ishmaelle, a small English girl, after her life is thrown astray due to the cruel play of fate, decides to change her own fate by going against the flow of the customs and traditions. attracted to the act of whale-hunting, Ishmaelle tries to become a member of the whaling crew, but gets disappointed by the fact that women aren't allowed to be part of the crew. left with no choice, she cuts her hair short, put on her brothers old rags and starts to live as a young man. and soon, part of a whaling crew. and the adventure begins there.

Not a moment I felt bored when I read tis book. pages after pages, my curiosity grew, as she met Kauri- a Polynesian prince who took an oath to be the armor of her- and stayed with her, even when he realized she wasn't the man he met. As they rode Nimrod into the uncharted waters, looking for whales, when the crew realized that she was a girl, when they all kept her safe and saw her as one of them- as their equal. and when the white pearl water frothed and streaked, gleaming the tail of the white ghost. MOBY DICK.

I'm grateful to the author that she portrayed Moby Dick as it truly would be, surviving the brutality of humanity a million times and yet living gracefully in the dark depth of the ocean, never once surrendering to the whalers. Carrying the countless harpoons that pierced through his flesh as victory marks and coming up to the surface as the refresher of the instigated fear among the seamen. I hope he had a calm death and finally got a chance to rest in peace. i hope the white ghost finally escaped the eyes of greed that surveilled him on the surface.

this will be one among the books i would recommend to people who love classics and enjoy contemporary fiction as well. i don't think anyone would ever feel this book as anywhere near boring and i'm excited to read the other works of the author!

If you are a fan of Moby Dick, this is a must read for a fresh angle and an infinitely more relatable and engaging read. I felt far more connected to Guo’s protagonist than any of the characters in Melville’s tale. The back story is well developed

A novel rich with detail that will draw readers in and immerse them into this Moby Dick retelling. This extremely well researched and written novel is for readers who enjoy exploring classical stories through different lenses. The novel would appeal to both those who enjoyed Moby Dick and readers who were less enthused by that thick tome. Some similarities include the outsider nature of the the narrator Ishmaelle, the precise details of the whaling ship, hierarchy and life aboard. Both are narratives about people who are seeking meaning to their lives, however, Ishmaelle also explores gender identity, race and our relationship with nature while maintaining the style and substance of the time period. Differences lie mainly in the representation and the construction of the narrative where we're allowed into the various thoughts of the characters, including a stream of thought from Captain Seneca, a Black man who is obsessed with hunting Moby Dick and pursued by a tragedy in his past.

Xialu Guo is a great writer, she's like talking and dissecting her thoughts to enlarge your visions. In Call me Ishmaelle, you have to accept she is creating her own world, like any artist would do, not in this period of life but in the past. Once you accept this element, the book is a pure jewel. The writing is clear and precise, and you are escaping in the imagination of the artist. This is exceptional today to find such quality and personality in the drafting of sentences, very personal, and at the same time the whole book is easy to read. This is quite an amazing reading experience ! I am very grateful to the author and the publisher. All opinions are mine.

This book was well written. Character development is it’s strong point. You become invested in their welfare from the start and as the story progresses that invest becomes stronger. This story has themes of race, gender roles, identity, religion and East meets West. If you enjoyed Moby Dick or even if you didn’t this retelling is so well written you will become a fan. I think the most interesting addition to this retelling was the addition Muzi the Taoist and his calming presence. He added a good balance to the story just as his character did for Ishmaelle.

The characters in this book are beautifully written and their crafting is heartfelt. The addition of diversity in so many forms - sex, gender, race, religion, and more - to a classic story brought a fresh complexity and tragic realism to the tale of Moby Dick. Thoughtful and thought-provoking, though perhaps a little slow, it is well worth the read, especially for those invested in the upheaval of what constitutes a "classic."