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Loading... The Mermaid Chair (original 2005; edition 2006)by Sue Monk Kidd
Work InformationThe Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd (2005)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Excellent story KIRKUS REVIEWAccording to Kidd?s follow-up to The Secret Life of Bees, there?s nothing like a little soulful adultery to get an anemic marriage back on track.Atlanta housewife and part-time artist Jessie Sullivan has been in a mild funk since her daughter Dee started college. Then she and her sensitive but controlling husband, Hugh, receive news that her obsessively devout mother, Nelle, has purposely cut off a fingerwhether out of misplaced piety or mental illness isn?t known. With trepidation, Jessie returns to the South Carolina barrier island where she was raised to care for Nelle. She still carries guilt that a spark from the pipe she had given her father supposedly caused the boating accident that killed him when she was nine. Since then, Nelle has cooked for the neighboring monks, whose patron saint, Saint Senare, was an Irish mermaid before she found God. Jessie meets and is immediately attracted to the newest addition to the monastery, Father Thomas. A former lawyer whose wife and unborn child died in a freak accident, Father Thomas, who has yet to take his final vows, is in charge of the rookery, so he spends his days paddling alone down various creeks. Soon, Jessie is paddling with him while delving into her own sensuality and selfhood. No pure lust, but a spiritual coupling has taken place as evidenced, at least, by the pictures she creates of a mermaid diving deep toward the ocean floor, while there?s much talk of being ?damned and saved both.? Jesse learns she isn?t to blame for her father?s death, but her relief is short-lived, since Nelle cuts off another finger. Loyal Hugh shows up to help and discovers Jessie?s affair. Once the truth of Jessie?s father?s death is revealed, Nelle begins a real recovery, while a wiser, stronger Jessie returns to the ever-patient Hugh, who vows to be a better husband.Bestselling Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees (2002) has a gift for language, but the saccharine aftertaste won?t go away. My thoughts about this book are on Booklikes at http://sheric.booklikes.com/post/797077/the-mermaid-chair-
Forty-three-year old Jessie Sullivan is pulled out of her staid life in Atlanta with her husband and daughter, back to her childhood home on Egret Island after her mother, Nelle, cuts off one of her own fingers. Jessie has been uneasy with the island since her beloved father died when she was nine in a boating accident, a tragedy Jessie has always felt partially responsible for. At the behest of her mother's best friend, Jessie journeys back to the island to try to reconnect with the mother she's never been close to. Jessie wants to know what drove her obviously disturbed mother to sever her finger, and she thinks Father Dominic, one of the Benedictine monks who resides in a nearby monastery, might know more about her mother's state of mind. But it is another monk who claims Jessie's attention--handsome Brother Thomas, who ignites in Jessie a passion so intense it overwhelms her, leading her to question her marriage and rediscover her artistic drive. Is contained inHas the adaptationAwardsDistinctions
Inside the abbey of a Benedictine monastery on tiny Egret Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. Jessie Sullivan's conventional life has been "molded to the smallest space possible." So when she is called home to cope with her mother's startling and enigmatic act of violence, Jessie finds herself relieved to be apart from her husband, Hugh. Jessie loves Hugh, but on Egret Island-- amid the gorgeous marshlands and tidal creeks--she becomes drawn to Brother Thomas, a monk who is mere months from taking his final vows. What transpires will unlock the roots of her mother's tormented past, but most of all, as Jessie grapples with the tension of desire and the struggle to deny it, she will find a freedom that feels overwhelmingly right. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Sue Monk Kidd is an incredible writer who creates stunning visuals and wonderful prose. The Mermaid Chair just didn’t hit all my hot buttons - don’t get me wrong, it was well-done, heartfelt, and definitely worth the read, but for me, was a bit too linear.
Jessie and Hugh have been married twenty years, their daughter Dee is just off to college, when Jessie, an artist turned stay-at-home mom receives a shocking call that her mother, Nelle, has intentionally cut off her own finger.
Back home on the tiny island where she grew up, Jessie works with her mother’s friends to try to get to the bottom of Nelle’s self-mutilation trauma. Jessie’s search leads her to the monastery where Nelle volunteers as a cook. Enter Brother Thomas.
The Mermaid Chair is quite churchy without being about religion. It imbues the moral rights and wrongs of the world while still allowing its characters to be human. Read, Jessie and the monk hook up. The book ends up the way it is “supposed to” not the way, in my opinion, it should have; and this is where it felt linear - just too predictable.
If you’ve never read or seen the 1983 blockbuster, The Thorn Birds, this book will be quite the original work. For me, unfortunately, I could not unsee what I had read so many decades ago.
Again, this book is worth your time as the author is truly gifted. ( )