Fluke Or, I know why the winged whale sings

Review by Booklist Review

Biologist Nate Quinn has been researching whale songs off the coast of Hawaii for years, and although he enjoys his work, he's never discovered anything really earth-shattering . . . until the day he sights the whale with "Bite Me" written across its tail. This astounding spectacle soon leads him and his trusty companions--flirtatious research assistant Amy; Clay, his loyal photographer; their perpetually stoned surfer-dude helper, Kona; and Nate's ex-wife, Libby, now a lesbian (apparently because of an unfortunate encounter with a randy male whale)--on a surprising adventure above and below the ocean. This amusing pastiche cobbles together elements from all the classic sea yarns: from Jonah and the Whale to Moby Dick to 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Unfortunately, the bland cover art, strange title, and lackluster jacket blurb will not help this book to fly off the shelves. Recommended for those looking for an idle beach read or something to take on a long plane flight. --Michael Gannon

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

From Jonah to Pinocchio, men have dreamed of stowing away alive in the bellies of whales. Nate Quinn experiences this doubtful honor in Moore's outrageous new novel (after Lamb). Nate studies whales, operating a small research unit in Lahaina in Maui along with Clay Demodocus, a famous undersea photographer, and two seasonal hires: Amy Earheart, supposedly a grad student from Woods Hole Institute, and Kona, a dreadlocked Hawaiian stoner. When Nate spots a humpback whale with "Bite Me" tattooed on a tail fluke, mysterious disasters start to strike. Then Nate, out with Amy, is swallowed by the tattooed humpback. Technically, this is impossible, nature having created narrow throats for humpback whales, but the tattooed one is a living ship, a simulacrum of a humpback run by a crew of humans and "whaley boys"-human/ whale cross breeds. Nate learns that they were designed by the Goo. (The Goo is a giant, intelligent organism that evolved undersea billions of years ago and has lately been spying on humans with fleets of false whales.) The whale ships dock in Gooville, an underwater city populated by supposedly drowned humans and horny whaley boys on shore leave. The place is run by the "Colonel," Nate's old teacher, "Growl" Ryder. Nate runs into Amy and helps foil the Colonel's mad plan to destroy the Goo. Meanwhile, Clay and Kona plan to come to Nate's rescue. Moore is endlessly inventive in his description of the rubbery, watery world of Goo, and his characters are perfectly calibrated, part credible human beings and part clever caricatures. This cetacean picaresque is no fluke-it is a sure winner. (June) Forecast: Moore's wacky fantasia may not be for everyone, but Morrow is ensuring that it reach the maximum number of readers possible, with a 16-city author tour and a major ad/promo campaign. Cult classic? Could be. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Ever since introducing us to a salt-munching genie a decade ago (Practical Demonkeeping), Moore has been a little offplumb. Here, in the second part of Fluke, he presents an organic, macrobiotic cosmos called "Goo," located some 600 feet below ocean surface off the coast of Chile, populated by "whaley-boys" (don't ask), historical personages and researchers captured when they start to figure out the "meaning" of whale song. In Part 1, we meet some such researchers who meet with one calamity after another until their leader is captured by a "whale-ship" (looks like a whale, acts like a whale, isn't a whale) when he starts to crack code and is taken to "Gootown," where he finds a long-believed-dead former professor changed into the megalomaniac "Colonel" who believes the world headed for a war of Genes (the "Goo") and Memes (the rest of us) and wants his Goo fiefdom destroyed. World-saving (two worlds, really) is in order. Sound complicated? Yes, but this is still one funny sociopolitical-scientific-cultural fable. For most popular collections.-Robert E. Brown, Minoa Lib., NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The culture of cetacean research is cheerfully lampooned in this antic seventh novel from the Tom Robbins/Douglas Adams-like author of Lamb (2002) and other gag-filled romps. The setting is the coast of Maui, where marine biologist Nathan Quinn, his associate Clay Demodocus, and lissome research assistant Amy Earhart are studying the "songs" of humpback whales. The tone is breezy, and the plot quickly fishtails into agreeable absurdity. Rude invective is detected on the thrashing flukes of a frequently sighted specimen. "Old Broad" resident Elizabeth Robinson claims to communicate with whales (one requests a pastrami-on-rye sandwich). "Ersatz Hawaiian" boathand "Kona" is jailed (after Quinn's office is vandalized), and narrowly escapes the amorous attentions of a gigantic Samoan detainee. So it goes. Clay and Amy become disconnected from their boat during a dive and are feared lost. Nathan is "eaten by a giant whale ship," reluctantly bonds with a super-race of piscatorial mutants, meets "the mysterious overlord of an undersea city," and eventually learns--from a radically transformed old acquaintance--what all the singing is really about. Few readers will be surprised to learn that all this is (rather stagily) thematically related to the integrity of the ecosystem and the punishments nature is storing up for humans who have slaughtered whales and otherwise traduced the natural order. Moore is far from at his best when thus veering into sermon mode, but he's a facile, entertaining writer, and has infectious fun hacking away at such targets as Canadian hockey violence, "whale huggers," the US Navy's shortsighted appropriation of oceanic resources for covert tests and experiments, cetacean sexual peccadilloes, supertankers, and a whole lot more. Smooth as a piÑa colada, and just about as substantial. Still: let Moore be Moore, and he will show you a good time. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Fluke Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings Chapter One Big and Wet. Next Question? Amy called the whale punkin. He was fifty feet long, wider than a city bus, and weighed eighty thousand pounds. One well-placed slap of his great tail would reduce the boat to fiberglass splinters and its occupants to red stains drifting in the blue Hawaiian waters. Amy leaned over the side of the boat and lowered the hydrophone down on the whale. "Good morning, punkin," she said. Nathan Quinn shook his head and tried not to upchuck from the cuteness of it, of her, while surreptitiously sneaking a look at her bottom and feeling a little sleazy about it. Science can be complex. Nate was a scientist. Amy was a scientist, too, but she looked fantastic in a pair of khaki hiking shorts, scientifically speaking. Below, the whale sang on, the boat vibrated with each note. The stainless rail at the bow began to buzz. Nate could feel the deeper notes resonate in his rib cage. The whale was into a section of the song they called the "green" themes, a long series of whoops that sounded like an ambulance driving through pudding. A less trained listener might have thought that the whale was rejoicing, celebrating, shouting howdy to the world to let everyone and everything know that he was alive and feeling good, but Nate was a trained listener, perhaps the most trained listener in the world, and to his expert ears the whale was saying -- Well, he had no idea what in the hell the whale was saying, did he? That's why they were out there floating in that sapphire channel off Maui in a small speedboat, sloshing their breakfasts around at seven in the morning: No one knew why the humpbacks sang. Nate had been listening to them, observing them, photographing them, and poking them with sticks for twenty-five years, and he still had no idea why, exactly, they sang. "He's into his ribbits," Amy said, identifying a section of the whale's song that usually came right before the animal was about to surface. The scientific term for this noise was "ribbits" because that's what they sounded like. Science can be simple. Nate peeked over the side and looked at the whale that was suspended head down in the water about fifty feet below them. His flukes and pectoral fins were white and described a crystal-blue chevron in the deep blue water. So still was the great beast that he might have been floating in space, the last beacon of some long-dead space-traveling race -- except that he was making croaky noises that would have sounded more appropriate coming out of a two-inch tree frog than the archaic remnant of a superrace. Nate smiled. He liked ribbits. The whale flicked his tail once and shot out of Nate's field of vision. "He's coming up," Nate said. Amy tore off her headphones and picked up the motorized Nikon with the three-hundred-millimeter lens. Nate quickly pulled up the hydrophone, allowing the wet cord to spool into a coil at his feet, then turned to the console and started the engine. Then they waited. There was a blast of air from behind them and they both spun around to see the column of water vapor hanging in the air, but it was far, perhaps three hundred meters behind them -- too far away to be their whale. That was the problem with the channel between Maui and Lanai where they worked: There were so many whales that you often had a hard time distinguishing the one you were studying from the hundreds of others. The abundance of animals was a both a blessing and a curse. "That our guy?" Amy asked. All the singers were guys. As far as they knew anyway. The DNA tests had proven that. "Nope." There was another blow to their left, this one much closer. Nate could see the white flukes or blades of his tail under the water, even from a hundred meters away. Amy hit the stop button on her watch. Nate pushed the throttle forward and they were off. Amy braced a knee against the console to steady herself, keeping the camera pointed toward the whale as the boat bounced along. He would blow three, maybe four times, then fluke and dive. Amy had to be ready when the whale dove to get a clear shot of his flukes so he could be identified and cataloged. When they were within thirty yards of the whale, Nate backed the throttle down and held them in position. The whale blew again, and they were close enough to catch some of the mist. There was none of the dead fish and massive morning-mouth smell that they would have encountered in Alaska. Humpbacks didn't feed while they were in Hawaii. The whale fluked and Amy fired off two quick frames with the Nikon. "Good boy," Amy said to the whale. She hit the lap timer button on her watch. Nate cut the engine and the speedboat settled into the gentle swell. He threw the hydrophone overboard, then hit the record button on the recorder that was bungee-corded to the console. Amy set the camera on the seat in front of the console, then snatched their notebook out of a waterproof pouch. "He's right on sixteen minutes," Amy said, checking the time and recording it in the notebook. She wrote the time and the frame numbers of the film she had just shot. Nate read her the footage number off the recorder, then the longitude and latitude from the portable GPS (global positioning system) device. She put down the notebook, and they listened. They weren't right on top of the whale as they had been before, but they could hear him singing through the recorder's speaker. Nate put on the headphones and sat back to listen. That's how field research was. Moments of frantic activity followed by long periods of waiting ... Fluke Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings . Copyright © by Christopher Moore. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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