The Mermaid Chair- by Sue Monk Kidd
First of all let me say that this post will contain many spoilers. From now on assume that all my posts will have spoilers, lol. I seem to spoil things.
This seems to be a popular book, so I am sure you guys have read it. My apologies if this has been discussed before; I could not find anything on the search here.
This was a bad book. I heard that this was not the authors best work (in comparison to the Life of Bees?). I heard that it was kind of cheesy too. But I decided to see what all the fuss was about it. I was looking for a light, short, easy 'brain candy' book and thought this might fit the bill.
It was just bad though. The writing was uninspiring and the plot trite. It was a cheap romance novel that aspired to be something greater.
First of all let me say that the theme was distasteful, at least it became so by the way the author wrote it. It was like the author had some erotic fantasy about doing it with a monk, who should be off limits, so she just had to write a book about it.
I did not like the way she handled the adultery part either. She made it sound like an affair was just a natural occurence, like something that every woman goes through to mark the passage into a new life. Then she made it seem like there would not be any consiquences of those actions.
Jessie, her main character, was also predictable. It was so trite! A housewife has become passive from the every-day monontony of her life and has become board of her loving husband. She feels emotianlly lost when her role in the family is displaced. So she goes out and finds someone else that is emotianally hurt; she needs to share what she is feeling with another person. She, finding her sexual drive again, makes love with this other person and finds a deeper conection. She loves that person.
The author simply CANNOT have her Jessie character seem shallow, so she pretends that there is actual LOVE between her and her monk-man.
I did not like any of the characters.
Monk man was nobody. One could not relate to him. He was just a toy.
I felt slightly sorry for Hugh the Husband, but thats all. I could not believe he took back his wife in the end.
Jessie was not interesting. She seemed more like a teenager, who does not know about the consequences of thier actions. She was selfish. The whole time she was at the island she did not help her mother at ALL. She was just out in the marshes or doing her monk.
Mental Mother was absurd. A sane person does not cut off thier fingers. Even a greiving person does not cut off thier appendages. She should have gone to the funny-farm. And what was her reason for cutting off her fingers? Because her husband commited suicide while sitting in a mermaid chair because he was ill and had taken poison from a DEAD FINGER PLANT! The mermaid-saint (!?!?) told her to do it. And what did she do with the 2nd bone-in finger? She kept it on her night-stand next to her Virgin Mary statue. Icky-poo.
The other characters were just aweful. All were charming...
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