The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kid

The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kid

I’ve read The Secret Life of Bees, and I loved it, and I’m a little fascinated with mermaids and mermaid stories too, so any book with “mermaid” in the title is bound to catch my attention.

While this book isn’t really about mermaids, it has a very interesting mermaid myth that features quite prominently in it.

What the book is about, is a 42-year old married woman, Jessie, who feels discontented with her life and finds a great reason to leave her husband and her home for the island she grew up in, when her mother deliberately cuts off her own finger.

There she falls in love with a monk, Brother Thomas, who hasn’t taken his final vows and who falls in love with her.

So what do you expect happens after that? What could happen after that? I pretty much expected the ending, which is to say, it is quite predictable, but in this instance and with this book, I’d say that it’s not the destination but the journey that matters. It certainly seems that way, for both the reader and for Jessie.

It is the journey that allows Jessie to grow and learn, and see things she’d never really seen before. Many things happen along the way, and she finds out things about her own past that she never expected, but in the end, things work out for the best.

All in all, this was an enjoyable read, but not an amazingly good one. What I enjoyed most was the descriptions of the mermaid chair and the myth. Well, what can I say, I do have a fascination with mermaid stories.