The text closes with a plea for a new story, for a remembrance of what might be, and what is real. Her journey to orient herself within the events of her past, to make sense of what happened, and, to stop it from happening again resonate in the present. As Bathsheba ponders, in retrospect, the space between what she is told by her captain and what she thinks for herself, the space between what she thought she might become and what she is expected to be, her world becomes subverted. But when her Captain takes a young man named Demetrius captive, and Bathsheba realizes that she can communicate with him, she finds herself questioning more and more the purpose of her hunt, and the dichotomies her life fits into. Bathsheba thinks she knows what her role in her pod is: to follow her Captain's orders in her quest to destroy the greatest evil the ocean has ever known. But some men are worse than others, and as Bathsheba's pod pursues their enemies, they one day find a devil of mythical proportions, Toby Wick. Using their harpoons to sink ships, they fend off these encroachers from their world, protecting their families from what they see as a dire threat to their advanced ways of existing. And I say traverse, not read, because And the Ocean Was Our Sky is, at its heart, a story about a journey between species, into hells, and in pursuit of prophecy and destiny leading only to more questions.īathsheba's pod is adept at hunting men, fighting them as part of a long war waged between whales and humans. But most powerfully, the narrative asks us to consider what devils we build for ourselves through blind, inherited hatred of the other, and what then it takes to overcome them, what the costs of moving beyond diametric violence might be.įramed by an epigraph from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: 'Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale to the last I grapple with thee from hell's heart I stab at thee for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee' and beginning with three words: 'Call me Bathsheba,' the text of Ness's novel harkens back to one of the most famous first lines in English literature 'Call me Ishmael.' From that point forward, readers are alerted, at least partially, to the depths of narrative they are about to traverse. Once again breaking genre boundaries, Ness's allegorical novel toys with readers' perceptions while provoking their moral compasses with regards to themes of vengeance, good versus evil, and the destructive power of hatred. Patrick Ness has developed a reputation for experimental literature executed well, and his latest, And the Ocean Was Our Sky, is no exception. Patrick Ness turns the familiar tale of Moby Dick upside down and tells a story all its own with epic triumph and devastating fate.

And the ocean was our sky patrick ness