I loved it. I just loved it. Everything about it. I don't read many books more than once. But I could read this one a few times more. I checked it out from the library on CD and the hard back book. The narrator is very, very good. Circumstances prevented me from having much time to sit and read, but I could listen to the book when I walked or in the car and finish it after I started the hard copy. I devoured it. Sometimes I'd listen to the chapter more than once bc it has such symbolism I did not want to miss. Beautifully written and one of my favorite settings. It will go on my top 10 list of favorite reads. I could easily relate to Jesse, the main character, all throughout the book. And to her journey of self discovery. Some of it has been my journey too. Just a feast for the soul. One I will have to buy to add to my bookshelf as a keeper. 5 Stars!!!!!!!!!!!!

What a lovely book. The writing is eloquent and thoughtful. It is about grief and loss and living. And most importantly how strong, independent women connect, protect and care for each other through the loss. I particularly liked how Jessie and her mother find their way through by laying claim to themselves.

I was so disappointed in the story-line of this book. I mean, come-on. Woman, tired/bored of her 20 year marriage, meets and falls instantly in love with a MONK, has an affair, etc, etc. blah, blah. I thought it was well written, had some beautiful language, but I just hated the story. I agree with this review: "the overall plot frustrates me. It presents a stereo-type of women that doesn’t sit well with me. It is possible to “find” yourself while still honoring your commitments and keeping your integrity intact. And that’s a plot line I’d like to see more of!" Amen to that.

Maybe it was just the wrong time to have read this book, but I hated the main character, found the "instant-love" ridiculous and decided that though the writing wasn't too bad the story is too contrived to actually be any good.

this book was horrid! if you want to read anything by sue monk kidd read The Secret Life of Bees that book has meaning and structure.

i thought the premise of this book, middle aged woman decides she is dissatisfied with her life so she has an affair and finds out that the "terrible" secret from her past is really actually boring, was so hackneyed i couldn't even finish reading. i skimmed to the end to find out the secret, and then laughed at the absurdity of it all.

don't bother with this book, spend your time somewhere else.

Not nearly as inspirational or moving as author's first novel, Secret Life of Bees. Although VERY well written the subject matter was not pleasing and almost distasteful. I liked the monks side of the story and can more readily understand why he did what he did. In his case he was questioning his faith, his existence, everything and was reaching out to anything that might pull him back to Life. In the woman's case, she was simply bored and unfulfilled in her marriage and was searching for self rather than any meaning of Life. Anytime we put self ahead of all else we lose sight of everything meaningful. It's okay to do for yourself once in while - to refill your 'well' in order to give more to others but when the focus becomes totally inward we quickly lose sight of what's around us and miss our opportunities to serve and uplift others. The woman in the story was selfish and self-absorbed and hurt the people she loved most. Although I think perhaps she "got it" at the end of the novel I didn't much care for the journey.

I love you as one loves certain dark things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
- Pablo Neruda

Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
- W. B. Yeats

This is a weird love story which could have and should have been better. The Mermaid Folklore related to Sainthood was extremely intriguing.

Favorite Passages:

They say you can bear anything if you can tell a story about it.
_______

In the end the mermaids did not save him. But I wonder if perhaps they saved me. I know this much: The mermaids came to me finally, in the pink hours of my life.
_______

When Dee was small, she'd mistakenly called the church the "Scared Heart of Mary." The two of us still referred to it that way sometimes, and it occurred to me now how apt the name really was. I mean, if Mary was still around, like so many people thought, including my insatiably Catholic mother, maybe her heart was scared. Maybe it was because she was on such a high and impossible pedestal - Consummate Monther, Good Wife, All-Around Paragon of Perfect Womanhood. She was probably up there peering over the side, wishing for a ladder, a parachute, something to get her down from there.
_______

I lay back on the bed; I felt like a tent collapsing, the center pole yanked out, followed by the billowy floating.
_______

"Jessie," she said. "The reason I called . . . Yesterday your mother cut off her finger with a meat cleaver. Her right index finger."
_______

I'd always felt that Kat harbored some knowledge about Mother that was off-limits to me, a wall with a concealed room behind it.
_______

"You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home."
_______

. . . I felt myself rise up out of that little smudge of ash, with the determination of a phoenix. I will leave here, I told myself. I will fly away.
_______

The last thing I'd expected was to stand on Hepzibah's porch and feel a seizure of love for Egret Island. And not just for the island but for the woman my mother had been, dancing around a fire.
Something struck me then: I'd never done any of those things my mother had done. Never danced on a beach. Never made a bonfire. Never waded into the ocean at night with laughing women and tied my life to theirs.
_______

I was surprised by the weight of memory, the awful contagion of family, of place.
_______

Kat slid back her foot, and we stood in the late afternoon, in a moment of perfect stillness, and stared at my mother's blood.
_______

That time Mike was eight and got his poor penis stuck in a Coke bottle while urinating into it - for reasons none of us ever understood. His penis had, shall we say, expanded somewhat after entry. Mother had tried to act concerned but broke down laughing. She told him, "Mike, go sit in your room and picture Mother Teresa, and your penis will come right out."
_______

"What happened to her finger?  The one she cut off?"
"It's in a mayonnaise jar by her bed," she answered matter-of-factly.
_______

The smell of gumbo hung inside the house in thick green ropes, like something you could swing on to get across the kitchen.
_______

What would I say to her? Do you have plans to sever any more body parts? It sounded crass, horrible, but that's what I really wanted to know - whether she was a danger to herself, whether she needed committing to some place that could take care of her.
_______

He said his religion was the sea. That it was his family. He'd told Mike and me stories about a sea kingdom ruled by a gang of ruthless and snails and the brave keyhole limpets who tried to overthrow them. His imagination was ingenious.
_______

Maybe her faith in the church made up for his lack of it. My mother and father made a peculiar couple - Walt Whitman and Joan of Arc - but it'd worked. They had adored each other. I was sure of that.
_______

I closed my eyes. I felt that the centerpiece of my history had been dug up and exposed as a complete and utter fiction. It left a gaping place I couldn't quite step over.
_______

Sit in the chair,
Say a prayer.
An answer tomorrow
From St. Senara.
_______

What matters is giving over to what you love.
_______

"Her hand is nearly mended," I said, "but I worry that her mind may never be."
_______

"Don't throw it away," she mumbled, her tone barely audible.
I bent over her. "What are you saying? Throw what away?"
A nurse making marks on a clipboard nearby looked up.
"She's been saying that since she started waking."
I bent down where I could smell the noxious odor of the anesthetic from her mouth. "Throw what away?" I repeated.
"My finger," she said, and the nurse stopped writing and stared at me with her mouth formed into a small, pinched circle.
"Where is your finger?" I asked. "I looked for it."
"In a bowl, in the refrigerator, " she said, her eyes already closed.
_______

"That's what I mean about redemption," I said. "I think all this dismembering she's doing is really about her need to grow something, or make a new world, to re-member herself back in a new way."
________

I'd thought we would be buried together. Side by side in a nice cemetery in Atlanta. Or that our cremated remains would sit in matching urns in Dee's house until she found it in herself to go out and scatter them. Once I'd imagined her hauling the urns all the way to Egret Island and tossing handfuls of us in the air on Bone Yard Beach. I'd pictured the wind whipping us together in a blizzard of indistinguishable particles - Hugh and me flying to the sky, returning to the earth, together. And Dee walking away with bits of us in her hair. What was the mysterious and enduring thing that had made me so certain of us for so long? Where had it gone?
_______

I sat in amazement, the translucence that comes when life hardens into a bead of such cruel perfection you see it with the purest clarity. Everything suddenly there - life as it truly is, enormous, appalling, devastating. You see the great sinkholes it makes in people and the harrowing lengths to which love will go to fill them.

3.75 ⭐️ Not bad

I really wanted to like this book and after being pleasantly surprised (and touched) by "The Secret Life of Bees" I was pretty eager to read it. Having said that, I didn't dislike it. I guess disappointed is the word. I was disappointed in the characters, the themes, the motivations and the plot overall. The characters seemed stock/shallow and a bit forced with the only believable one of the lot being the poor husband (and the friend’s “off” daughter, who was a hoot...we needed more of her) and the dog. Nothing is really explained and while I understand that impulses don't always warrant explanation, it still left me feeling a bit used up and frustrated. The sex scenes were especially tedious and sometimes I almost felt as if this was a serious confessional (but I also think I’m a bit of a prude). I found myself plodding along because it wasn't a very long book in hopes that at some point it would suddenly make sense. And don't get me wrong, Sue Monk Kidd has talent, there are some brilliant passages here, beautiful and moving and as real as anything you'd like. The mystery of the mother and her self mutilation was quite intriguing as well as various "touched upon" descriptions of the island (like the slave cemetery). But overall it was a bit of a let down and I may have expected too much of it because of the previous read. So I apologize for wanting that "heck yeah!" feeling I got with "Secret Life of Bees" and should have just let this one present itself on its own without pretext.

I see that several reviewers don’t like the plot line of a woman discovering her Self, especially when such discovery involves infidelity. The implication is that the author is taking the easy way out with this plot ‘trick’. I disagree.

In The Mermaid Chair, Kidd takes pains to explain. In the words of the character Hugh, a psychiatrist:
“...when a person was in need of cataclysmic change, of a whole new center in the personality, for instance, his or her psyche would induce an infatuation, an erotic attachment, an intense falling-in-love.”

I loved this book. Sue Monk Kidd is on the verge of becoming my new favourite author. After I read the three of her books that I have lined up and waiting, I’ll know for sure.

This book is so corny it will pass straight through you, undigested.

Horrible new age romantic schlock with a side of southern gothic. On the plus side, it makes a great hate read, and your eye-roll muscles will get a fine workout.