Cindy’s Blog :: January

Review: The Mermaid Chair

January 27, 2007

I had problems with this book by Sue Monk Kidd. She’s the author of The Secret Life of Bees, which was excellent. Mermaid, however, doesn’t live up to Bees. It started out engagingly, with a woman married 20 years to a kind husband with a child whose just left for college - so close to my situation. There’s the intrique of her mother’s mental health crisis too. But then it degenerates into a sappy romance as she supposedly falls in love with a monk at first sight. From there it veers on and off into a nauseating likeness to Message in a Bottle. But her husband is presented as the ultimate wonder husband - loving, successful, faithful, caring - making it hard to understand why she has any interest in anyone else, much less a monk she knows nothing about.

I’m sure I missed whatever the point of this book is.

I give it 2 out of 5 stars. **

The year so far

Here’s what’s happened:

1) Garrison has a hernia now from all the heavy weight lifting. We don’t see the surgeon until the end of the month. He can still play the saxophone (quietly) and can lift weights if he breathes while he lifts.

2) The stupid rabbits have started fighting again. I thought that Fred had lost his eye, but it’s open again and looks o.k. The little pea brains. At one point Ed was in the bunny palace and was running from one spot to another inside it. Each time he would stop, Fred ran to that spot and they touched mouths through the cage wire. ?! Kissing? Biting?

Later Fred went elsewhere and Lucy entered the palace with Ed. I imagined Fred thinking “I lost an eye for you, girl and this is the thanks I get? You hang out with the loser?”