text: I truly wanted to like this book.  After years of avoidance I had just finished Moby Dick and found it not only more readable than I'd feared but downright enjoyable.  In addition I'd heard nothing but good things about this novel whose premise certainly intrigued me, and like its predecessor it has one of the truly great opening lines in literature:  "Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last."  Alas, it was all down hill from there; overall this is one of the worst books I've ever forced myself to finish.
  
  This came as quite a surprise because the author is no untalented hack.  Author of two other published novels and a short story collection, director of a university level creative writing program, long-term teacher of writing, and holder of a Ph.D. in same, all to considerable critical acclaim, she should be correcting and grading (failing) garbage like this not producing it.  So what went wrong?  How did this novel end up so awful?  The answer is brick by brick and piece by piece.  There is no one great thing wrong with it but rather a lot of little things.
  
  LENGTH: If "brevity is the soul of wit", this novel's witlessness is easily explained.  At 666 pages (interesting number that) this novel is about three times as long as it should have been.  It would seem that, to some extent like Melville before her, Naslund confused Length with Importance, but Melville was a lot more skilled at padding than she is.  IMHO this desire to fill too many pages made many of the other problems worse by allowing Naslund both to go into unnecessary detail about things no one else cares about and to repeat herself to the point of self-parody.  Somewhere under the barnacle encrustations may be the finely lined hull of a short novel, but this was a manuscript desperately in need of editing... with a meat axe or a chainsaw.
  
  THE NAME DROPPING: One of the pleasures of any historical novel is the encounters between fictional characters and historical figures, but if badly handled these encounters can un-suspend disbelief and downright offend.  They are badly handled here.  An almost uneducated hick from the backwoods of Kentucky encounters by chance a significant number of the thoughtful elites of mid-nineteenth century New England and those she doesn't utterly charm with her brilliance and erudition she gets the better of as in her unintentionally hilarious encounter with Naslund's peculiar imagining of Nathaniel Hawthorne.  One or two of these, developed at greater length could have added to the verisimilitude.  As it is, it is a Zelig or a Forrest Gump without the humor (or the self-awareness).
  
  THE POLITICS: Even the most conservative readers would probably find the popular views of a majority of mid-nineteenth century New Englanders a bit disconcerting if espoused straight in a modern novel, so a certain amount of modernizing would be appropriate just to reduce the cringing.  However, Naslund takes this to the opposite extreme by having Una espouse the Politically Correct view on every single controversy of the day (and some that only exist in our significantly sillier day) from slavery to whaling, from feminism to free love, from homosexuality to sensitivity towards the differently abled, all without consequence or even criticism.  This latter is the most offputting because to have actually championed such views back then would have taken considerable courage whatever one thinks of the ideas themselves.  Una espouses them with all the negative consequences that Naslund receives for espousing them today, which is to say: none.
  
  THE ANTI-CHRISTIAN BIGOTRY: There is nothing so very wrong with characters in a mid-nineteenth century novel exhibiting agnosticism or atheism as both views were gaining more and more credence at the time, but it is downright silly to suggest that such views would have been widely accepted.  It is even sillier to portray Christianity as something confined exclusively to the foolish, the bigoted, the future apostate, or the mentally ill.  It tells us more about the author than anything else that Una is openminded towards every religious and quasi-religious idea of the time EXCEPT Christianity.
  
  THE FARFETCHED SCENARIOS: I sensed the novel was in trouble during the opening scene in which Una loses both her mother and her baby but manages to withstand this blow by making friends with a runaway slave with whom she has a quasi-lesbian encounter....  After this the novel goes into flashback and becomes unrealistic.  After her crazy Christian father threatens to kill her (a sentiment the reader will come to know and understand), Una is raised in a lighthouse by her ludicrously liberal-minded aunt and uncle, encounters two young men who both fall in love with her, disguises herself as a cabin boy and sails on the same whaler with them, successfully avoids detection, is sunk by a whale, survives by committing cannibalism, marries the surviving young man after he goes insane, and is abandoned by him after he goes to live with the Indians, leaving her free to "marry" Captain Ahab (Una never really "marries" anybody but of course nobody ever criticizes).  Things don't get more realistic in the second half, which includes Una's clever and successful investment in the crazy newfangled idea of obtaining oil from the ground instead of from a whale.  Riiiight.
  
  THE MARY SUE: However, the absolute worst thing about this novel is the fact that it is a "Mary Sue" that peculiarity of fan fiction in which a laughably idealized and practically perfect in every way alter ego of the author fulfills some basic psychological need while inducing a combination of anger and nausea in the reader.  A more realistic main character might have saved it.  Una never learns anything from her life's too-many-to-be-believed experiences because she already knows everything.  She doesn't change because she is already perfect.  She doesn't have to deal with the criticism of others because she doesn't receive any, and she doesn't have to beg the forgiveness of those she has wronged because they forgive her so easily and besides, Una had her reasons (and they were very good ones you can be sure).
  
  The only thing I can figure is that her publisher approved this book on concept alone WITHOUT anyone ever reading it.  I feel like I've just waded through the inept scribbling of a delusional teenage girl who insists on rereading Moby Dick in her bedroom... with the door locked.
  