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    The Mermaid Chair
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    The Mermaid Chair
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    The Mermaid Chair
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Mermaid Chair

    Written by Carol Shields

    Narrated by Eliza Foss

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The New York Times-bestselling second novel by the author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings 

    Inside the church of a Benedictine monastery on 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.

    When Jessie Sullivan is summoned home to the island to cope with her eccentric mother's seemingly inexplicable behavior, she is living a conventional life with her husband, Hugh, a life "molded to the smallest space possible." Jessie loves Hugh, but once on the island, she finds herself drawn to Brother Thomas, a monk about to take his final vows. Amid a rich community of unforgettable island women and the exotic beauty of marshlands, tidal creeks, and majestic egrets, Jessie grapples with the tension of desire and the struggle to deny it, with a freedom that feels overwhelmingly right and the immutable force of home and marriage.

    Is the power of the mermaid chair only a myth? Or will it alter the course of Jessie's life? What happens will unlock the roots of her mother's tormented past, but most of all, it will allow Jessie to comes discover selfhood and a place of belonging as she explores the thin line between the spiritual and the erotic.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 10, 2004
    ISBN9780786553365
    Unavailable
    The Mermaid Chair
    Author

    Carol Shields

    Carol Shields’s novels include Unless; Larry’s Party, winner of The Women’s Prize; The Stone Diaries, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Republic of Love; Happenstance; and Mary Swann. Dressing Up for the Carnivaland Various Miracles, collections of short stories, were later published as The Collected Stories. Brought up in Chicago, Shields lived in Canada from 1957 until her death in 2003.

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    Reviews for The Mermaid Chair

    3/5

    1,995 ratings108 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      This book pales in comparison to The Secret Life of Bees. Sue Monk Kidd still shows her brilliance as an author in this book but having read her first, it's impossible to think this book is great. The many elements that were present in her first book were shockingly absent from this one. The characters weren't dynamic at all, though they could have had strong personalities, the reader didn't get much of that coming through.

      I got the feeling that the main character (Jessie) was supposed to go through some huge transition... which I suppose she did, but I didn't feel like a part of it at all. Her character was detached in the novel and was detached from the reader which made it very difficult for me to give a damn about what she had to say.

      The other major character, Nelle (Jessie's mother) wasn't major at all. To me, she was placed to be a facilitator in Jessie's transformation but she wasn't present enough to actually facilitate anything within the written words.

      In the end, the book just got more and more difficult to get through, and the only thing holding me in was finding out the truth about Jessie's father (the climax?). However, even this seemed watered down when it was finally presented. It should have been this big moment, the end all be all for everybody, and it just wasn't for me at all.

      I do believe I'd be far less critical if The Secret Life of Bees hadn't been so phenomenal. However, it was, and I think Sue Monk Kidd has far more potential than was shown in this novel. I do look forward to her writing more and coming alive more in future works.
    • 2/5
      I was pretty disappointed in this book. It wasn't terrible....just not quite what I was expecting.
    • 2/5
      This book pales in comparison to The Secret Life of Bees. Sue Monk Kidd still shows her brilliance as an author in this book but having read her first, it's impossible to think this book is great. The many elements that were present in her first book were shockingly absent from this one. The characters weren't dynamic at all, though they could have had strong personalities, the reader didn't get much of that coming through.

      I got the feeling that the main character (Jessie) was supposed to go through some huge transition... which I suppose she did, but I didn't feel like a part of it at all. Her character was detached in the novel and was detached from the reader which made it very difficult for me to give a damn about what she had to say.

      The other major character, Nelle (Jessie's mother) wasn't major at all. To me, she was placed to be a facilitator in Jessie's transformation but she wasn't present enough to actually facilitate anything within the written words.

      In the end, the book just got more and more difficult to get through, and the only thing holding me in was finding out the truth about Jessie's father (the climax?). However, even this seemed watered down when it was finally presented. It should have been this big moment, the end all be all for everybody, and it just wasn't for me at all.

      I do believe I'd be far less critical if The Secret Life of Bees hadn't been so phenomenal. However, it was, and I think Sue Monk Kidd has far more potential than was shown in this novel. I do look forward to her writing more and coming alive more in future works.
    • 4/5
      Good read, colorful imagery
    • 3/5
      Entertaining
    • 4/5
      I love her prose. There were so many memorable lines and images in the book. However, there were also some weaknesses in plot and characters. The illicit love affair was contrived and predictable. The mother though a central figure remained flat while the heroine's middle age crisis might seems to some like the whining of an otherwise very lucky woman. Nonetheless
    • 3/5
      I didn't like Jessie very much. She was very selfish. She gave no thought to the damage she was doing to her marriage by getting involved in Whit.Her marriage will survive, but it will be slow. She also hurt her relationship with her daughter.
    • 3/5
      I did not enjoy this as much as the secret life of bees, which I loved from start to finish. The first half of the book felt a bit too much like a Mills and Boon but it definately picked up towards the end when Jessie learnt more about her father and the last few chapters had me shed a tear or two, which doesn't happen often when I read a book.
    • 4/5
      It was slow at first...ended up really liking the story.
    • 3/5
      The Mermaid Chair follows Jessie Sullivan through a year of doubt and self-discovery about her role as a wife and daughter. Haunted by the tragic loss of her father at a young age, Jessie returns decades later to the South Carolina island of her youth following a radical and desperate act of self-mutilation committed by her estranged mother. Seeking an escape from her stagnant and suffocating marriage and anxious for answers regarding her mother’s descent into mental despair, she turns to the landscape of her youth. Gradually she discovers hope, direction, and a new-found appreciation for self through unexpected love, abandoning her mind and body to art and nature, and the closure regarding her father’s death she has continuously sought. Painfully honest, yet ultimately hopeful, The Mermaid Chair is a candid look at the complexities of family and the importance of being true to one’s self.
    • 3/5
      I liked Secret Life of Bees thus choose this. Interesting story. Kind of a woman's mid-life crisis.
    • 3/5
      I had this around from someone else and just wanted to move it along. It's a good enough story about marriage and faith, not really my kind of book at this point. But it's nice enough for what it is.
    • 2/5
      I could probably flip a coin on whether I liked this book with decent accuracy. I was pretty happy with it in the beginning and I enjoyed the imagery and descriptions of island life. Unfortunately, I just couldn't get behind the main character.

      I think the main reason it was so hard to stick this book out is that I'm bored with the *norm* in "these" books. I'm all for figuring out what makes you happy and working towards it. But why is it always the *let's find someone to fall madly in love with (read: have a selfish affair with) and that will fix absolutely everything in my life* formula? There's other, less melodramatic, ways to find yourself. Seeing as you're really not finding yourself at all when you're falling over on someone else. It just felt flighty in the long run rather than the thought provoking novel that's self-discovery meets mermaid imagery I was hoping for.
    • 3/5
      I liked this book to a point. It was disappointing to me.
      I would still reccomend it.
    • 5/5
      Sue Monk Kidd is such a talented writer and storyteller. This is the story of Jessie, who struggling with midlife crisis, returns to her childhood home to care for her mother and winds up falling in love with a monk. Well written, a wise and poignant book.
    • 4/5
      While Kidd places an obvious importance on the role of mysticism and legend in this tale, including the mysterious mermaid's chair at the center of the island's history, the relationships between characters is what gives this novel its true weight. Once she returns to her childhood home, Jessie is forced to confront not only her relationship with her estranged mother, but her other emotional ties as well. After decades of marriage to Hugh, her practical yet conventional husband, Jessie starts to question whether she is craving an independence she never had the chance to experience. After she meets Brother Thomas, a handsome monk who has yet to take his final vows, Jessie is forced to decide whether passion can coexist with comfort, or if the two are mutually exclusive. As her soul begins to reawaken, Jessie must also confront the circumstances of her father's death, a tragedy that continues to haunt Jessie and Nelle over thirty years later.
    • 4/5
      Just finished reading this for the second time. I had completely forgotten the story, but obviously enjoyed it more this time because I will remember it. You have to have a wildly flowing imagination to allow it to charm you. Perhaps it was a little too convenient that both lovers found a comfortable time to begin and to end, somehow each managing to satisfy a mid-life need and emerge better for the affaire de coeur. Hmmm. I gave it 4 stars because it was different and entertaining. I was touched by it.
    • 2/5
      I felt bad for the men in the story.
    • 5/5
      Whether Ms. Kidd meant it or not, this is an affirmation of the power of woman. I don't begrudge it, I just note it. I wish that The Good Ole Boys in DC and the redneck imbeciles in the middle of this country would hurry up and recognize that fact, get off their high horses, and encourage The Powerful to take charge and commence correcting all the damage that has been done over the last two centuries.I gave the book 4.5 stars mostly because of it's cleverness.
    • 4/5
      I admit, I'm a longtime fan of SMK. Loved her Dance of the Dissident Daughter, loved The Secret Life of Bees, and I love mermaids, yet this book... a little harder to get into. She has a beautiful, poetical way of expressing life's deeper questions, and yet... I found Jessie, her heroine, a bit whiny and self-indulgent. I "get" the whole idea of a woman discovering she must reinvent herself, in her forties, but... I was not surprised by her extramarital adventure, and thought the object of her fling, and her husband, were a bit too convenient and accommodating.

      I did fall in love with the Mermaid Chair, itself (I want one!); and was surprised at its connection with Jessie's beloved father. I love the way SMK integrates all the senses - I could feel the pluff mud on my feet, smell it, see the egrets flying through the air. The little details and secondary characters are wonderful, from Max the Island Dog, to Kat and Hepzibah. And what do you do with your elderly mother who has deliberately hacked off her finger yet seems perfectly sane? All in all, a very worthwhile read, especially if you are a woman in your forties or fifties.
    • 2/5
      It's hard not to compare "The Mermaid Chair" to "The Secret Life of Bees." Kidd is attempting something completely different here, so it's probably not fair to compare plot and characters.

      But the writing is self-conscious. The language is so beautiful it takes me out of the story in almost every paragraph, which is not what I want in a novel. I want it to be so beautiful it buoys the story rather than drowning it.

      Petrea Burchard
      Camelot & Vine
    • 1/5
      I enjoyed [book: The Secret Life of Bees] by the same author, but this was just awful. I don't even want to go into how unrealistic and juvenile it was.
    • 3/5
      This book follows one woman's journey solving the mystery of her father's death, the mental illness of her mother, and her own search to find herself as she leaves her husband and becomes involved with a monk. The book examines marriage and commitment.
    • 5/5
      This is a beautiful story about a woman going through a midlife crisis. She returns to her hometown and faces the ghosts of her past while she learns to embrace her passions and love herself.It shouldn't really be compared to The Secret Life of Bees because the audience it is intended for is different, but in my opinion it is just as good in its own right.
    • 1/5
      This woman falls in love with a monk, and when they finally have sex it's... missionary.

      BA-DUM-CHHHHHHH!
    • 2/5
      I started to read this book about a year and a half ago at a conference. I got through about a chapter and then never picked it up again when I got home.

      It has been on my mind, so I finally picked it up again. This time, I only read about half of the book. It just didn't grab me. I didn't care about the characters or their problems. I don't think I really could relate to the problems the various characters were experiencing. I also thought the book was paced slowly. Some of the books I read last year really spoiled me for pace.

      There were things that I liked about it. I liked the idea of living on an island and the descriptions of the landscape and fauna. there was a little bit of quirkiness to some of the characters, which I also liked.
    • 1/5
      Awful. Too cliched and fabricated.
    • 4/5
      This novel is all about awakening to one’s greater self. It’s simply written, evocative, mythic and yet modern. The protagonist, Jessie, must leave her housewifely existence and return to the island where she grew up. She finds herself beset by her mother’s madness, her family’s secrets, and her sudden passion for a monk. These things carry her like an inexorable tide towards self-knowledge and wider creative expression.
    • 2/5
      This book tries hard to escape chic lit and wants to rise above that genre by including a look of psychology and deep-thinking, but it fails. On the surface the book is about Jessie trying to help her mother, Nell, through her craziness and compulsion to cut off her fingers as Nell battles her feelings about her husband's death 30 yrs earlier. But really the book is about Jessie's search to find her identity. She'd lived with the guilt of her father's death, as a mother, as a dutiful wife, as someone who dabbled in art (she says she couldn't call herself an artist), but back on the island where she grew up she's given the opportunity to lose that self and reclaim herself as her own person.

      If the author didn't resort to a few cliche conversations and scenes (especially the love scenes), iIf the conclusion of the story wasn't inevitable and obvious before I got half way through the book, if the characters didn't have perfect intuition most of the time and dimwits at other times (especially the main character), if there had been soemthing unique in this story, the author may have pulled it off. But it didn't work for me.

      Read [book:The Secret Life of Bees] instead.
    • 3/5
      I don’t usually do this, but today I’m going to rely on the inside book cover to tell you what this book is about…"…Now in her luminous new novel, Kidd has woven a transcendent tale… Inside the church of a Benedictine monastery on 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.When Jessie is summoned home to the island to cope with her eccentric mother’s seemingly inexplicable act of violence, she is living a conventional life with her husband Hugh. Jessie loves Hugh, but once there, she finds herself drawn to Brother Thomas a monk who is soon to take his final vows.Few novels explore the lush, unknown region of the feminine soul where the thin line between the spiritual and the erotic exists. Where does the yearning for a soul-mate come from? How does a woman find the place of self-belonging in herself."So here’s the thing. There are parts of this book that are beautifully written. There are luminous moments as the cover promises, but the relationship between the main characters just doesn’t make sense to me. Jessie and Brother Thomas, two mature adults see each other one dark night in the woods and it’s love at first sight – what? They spend a few months sneaking off for hanky panky in the sand and without hesitation declare their undying love for each other. But when Jessie’s mom goes off the deep end it becomes clear that Brother Thomas isn’t going to be the one to help her deal with the problems. There are some great characters on the island, and a dog that is a celebrity in his own right. It’s clear that Jessie is struggling in her relationships with Hugh, her mother, and her daughter as well as with the death of her father when she was a child. She is sad and confused and has a lot of “issues” to work out.As I’m writing this I’m thinking, okay I guess I get it. But that’s not what I thought while I was reading. Then I thought, they’re not in love, they’re in lust – you don’t really expect me to believe they’re going to live happily ever after do you? Maybe Kidd wanted me to react that way. Maybe she was trying to show how confused, distraught people behave in erratic, unreasonable ways?I suppose this is one of the reasons that I love books. They make me think. And there’s something to be said for a book that elicits this kind of a response from me! Do I recommend this one, honestly I’m not sure! I’d say if a book about relationships, family, trauma and figuring out who you are and where you’re going is you’re thing than give it a try. And please, let me know what you think. If none of that stuff interests you than it’d be best to steer clear.