The Mermaid Chair, Sue Monk Kidd

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.