SEMI-SPOILERISH REVIEW:

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. ( )

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 finger�whether 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-
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Here's what I wrote in 2008 about this read:"Woman caring for each other, as their lives turn their various ways and as some confront the mysteries of their past, and issues of the present. Set on a ficticious barrier island of the coast of S. Carolina. OK." ( )

The book started out in a manner I didn't care for in plots. It seemed predictable. I would not have continued to read the book except that her writing is so beautiful. The second half of the book was more like what I had expected of Sue Monk Kidd. ( )