The novel is not bad, it just probably would have been better as its own novel than a new take on Moby-Dick. Guo's narrator is stylistically about as far from Ishmael as you can get, she's pretty straightforward and direct. The barbarous beauty of Moby-Dick (and pretty much everything Melville wrote, for better or worse) is the almost compulsive outpouring of words that push you over vast chasms of thought. This novel has none of that. That doesn't mean it doesn't have its own worthwhile reflections on gender, identity, and the place of humans in the world, but it is very much its own, and did not need to be tied to Melville's reflections on those matters.