Product Description

Sue Monk Kidd’s stunning debut, The Secret Life of Bees, has transformed her into a genuine literary star. Now, in her much-anticipated new novel, Kidd has woven a transcendent tale that will thrill her legion of fans and cement her reputation as one of the most remarkable writers at work today.

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.

What inspires the yearning for a soul mate? Few writers have explored, as Kidd does, the lush, unknown region of the feminine soul where the thin line between the spiritual and the erotic exists. The Mermaid Chair is a vividly imagined novel about the passions of the spirit and the ecstasies of the body; one that illuminates a woman’s self-awakening with the brilliance and power that only a writer of Kidd’s ability could conjure.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #56647 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 335 pages

Amazon.com
Sue Monk Kidd's The Mermaid Chair is the soulful tale of Jessie Sullivan, a middle-aged woman whose stifled dreams and desires take shape during an extended stay on Egret Island, where she is caring for her troubled mother, Nelle. Like Kidd's stunning debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees, her highly anticipated follow up evokes the same magical sense of whimsy and poignancy.

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.

By boldly tackling such major themes as love, betrayal, grief, and forgiveness, The Mermaid Chair forces readers to question whether moral issues can always be interpreted in black or white. It is this ability to so gracefully present multiple sides of a story that reinforces Kidd's reputation as a well-respected modern literary voice. --Gisele Toueg

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Jessie Sullivan, the protagonist of this rewarding second novel by the author of the bestselling Secret Life of Bees, is awakened by a shrilling phone late one night to horrifying news: her mother, who has never recovered from her husband Joe's death 33 years earlier, has chopped off her own finger with a cleaver. Frantic with worry, and apprehensive at the thought of returning to the small island where she grew up in the shadow of her beloved father's death and her mother's fanatical Catholicism, 42-year-old Jessie gets on the next plane, leaving behind her psychiatrist husband, Hugh, and college-age daughter, Dee. On tiny Egret Island, off the coast of South Carolina, Jessie tries to care for her mother, Nelle, who is not particularly eager to be taken care of. Jessie gets help from Nelle's best friends, feisty shopkeeper Kat and Hepzibah, a dignified chronicler of slave history. To complicate matters, Jessie finds herself strangely relieved to be free of a husband she loves—and wildly attracted to Brother Thomas, né Whit O'Conner, a junior monk at the island's secluded Benedictine monastery. Confusing as the present may be, the past is rearing its head, and Jessie, who has never understood why her mother is still distraught by Joe's death, begins to suspect that she's keeping a terrible secret. Writing from the perspective of conflicted, discontented Jessie, Kidd achieves a bold intensity and complexity that wasn't possible in The Secret Life of Bees, narrated by teenage Lily. Jessie's efforts to cope with marital stagnation; Whit's crisis of faith; and Nelle's tormented reckoning with the past will resonate with many readers. This emotionally rich novel, full of sultry, magical descriptions of life in the South, is sure to be another hit for Kidd.
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Critics generally agree that despite some thematic similarities, The Mermaid Chair is a sophomoric slump compared to Kidd's bestselling debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees (2002). Kidd, who's also authored several inspirational books, draws on her theological background to depict her characters' awakening states. Despite complimenting some beautiful passages describing the Southern landscape, critics quickly ridiculed the novel's enlightened romance—for Jessie, one of "transgression and betrayal," but "also mystery and what felt like holiness." The novel's glacial pace and awkward mermaid symbolism only detracted from what could have been a poignant love story. If you're a fan, however, perhaps there is enough pain and sacrifice to keep you reading.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Not as good as bees...
I thoroughly enjoyed Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, so I was anxious to read The Mermaid Chair. This book is nowhere near the quality of The Secret Life.

The Mermaid Chair opens when Jessie Sullivan receives an early morning phone call that her mother has cut off one of her fingers. Sullivan and her mom have a difficult relationship at best, and it has been years since Sullivan visited her on Egret Island (an imaginary island outside of Charleston, SC). But she now has no choice but to return to Egret Island and deal with her religious-fanatic mom, Nelle. In the process, she must deal with the secrets that her mother and friends have been hiding from Sullivan. These secrets are most probably responsible for Nelle's mental instability as well as Sullivan's guilt about her childhood. She also falls in love with Brother Thomas, a monk on the island (Sullivan is married with a college-aged daughter). Overall, I couldn't develop much sympathy or affection for any Kidd's characters, except for Sullivan's saintly husband, Hugh. Some parts of The Mermaid Chair were excellent, including Kidd's descriptions of the low country of South Carolina. However, the ending was very predictable and the reader just knows what will happen.

The Mermaid Chair is a good beach book--especially if you're near Charleston, SC. But if you're looking for great literature, you'll need to look elsewhere.

STUNNED & Reflective
I think Sue Monk Kidd has written a truthful account about the lives that women conceal from themselves. It is a courageous and successful publication of how women can lose themselves in their family roles. Perhaps the uncomfortable truth Kidd writes about is that even in the "curbside appeal" of a marriage, one person can be drowning. Jessie made decisions to stay at home and make art in a studio, but as she lost her sense of self, her art diminished...as she later says even her art was in a box, she was in a box. How many of us have ever realized that we had made decisions that ultimately led us to be boxed in? Then what? You stay there or fight your way out. How many women have been "glossed" over by a doting husband? Ignored or diminished by a loving condescension? Jessie husband Hugh recognizes that he has contributed to her feelings of diminishment. Sue Monk Kidd has written a story about a woman who has lost herself, and eventually comes to understand that she had never truly known herself apart from her father, her husband or her lover. It is a story about how TRUTH brings you to your knees and allows you to build something real. It's not a story about a woman who commits adultery with an almost monk--it is about how an emotionally diminished woman finds herself wrapped in her mother's pain, her father's death and her own longing to find her place in the real world.Waiting for Odysseus

Embarassingly bad
I loved Secret Life of Bees, but this book is just awful. It reads like a bad romance novel. There is no way this would have even been published if her former book hadn't been a bestseller. Absurd situations, unbelievable characters, laughable language.