Jonathan Peto's Reviews > Isabel of the Whales

If you know a child interested in whales and/or the ocean, this book may be for them, especially if they do not mind an 11 year old girl protagonist and if they might enjoy mixing their ecological concerns with fantasy.

In the first chapter, when the main character, Isabel, was playing Truth or Dare with her friends Molly and Kristen, I really wondered if my son was going to let me read the entire book aloud. We made it, but I’m not so sure he would have on his own. There’s adventure, but a lot of it is based on wonder and marvelous encounters rather than life threatening events, though that occurs too in the last fifth or so of the story.

Basically, it tells you this on the blurb so I’m not spoiling anything, but Isabel is not an ordinary girl. Her interest in whales is not arbitrary. It turns out she is destined to turn into one, which she does fairly quickly.

Her adventures as a whale are interesting, especially as she adjusts and is welcomed into their ranks. In fact, they’d been expecting her! The description of her movements in the water and other experiences as a whale are smooth and lovely - bad writing never jerked me away from my visualizations of her underwater and surface-spouting new world. Even her conversations with the other whales, rendered as dialogue usually is, was fine.

For me, events dragged a little once Isabel got acclimated to her new life, even though I really wondered at times if she would remain a whale. The possibility made me tense actually. I really wondered, and forgive me for being species-ist, if remaining a whale would be satisfying after life as a, well, you know, technology-wielding, globe-trotting human being.

The pace does pick up again. A love interest develops. That actually brought out my New England puritanical discomfort a little, but probably did not go far enough to make most people squirm. Isabel follows the whales to their feeding “grounds”, then to their breeding “grounds”. You’d learn more from reading Moby Dick, I suppose, but this may actually get someone interested in tackling that classic someday. The first line of Isabel of the Whales is “Call me Isabel”.