Sue Monk Kidd

Last year, when I read The Secret Life of Bees, I fell in love with it. In that book, Sue Monk Kidd’s words had a rhythm of their own, reminiscent of a sultry summer day, and the slow blossoming of a girl into womanhood.

This year’s offering, The Mermaid Chair, is a vastly different novel, told in a totally different tone, but there’s a similar vividness in Kidd’s scene-setting. Her fictional Outer Banks island is so real I could smell the salt air, and feel the sand under my feet. Her characters are distinctive – the daughter who is having a mid-life crisis, the mother who is still mouring her long-dead husband, and doing a personal penance by cutting off and burying her own fingers, the young novice monk who finds God in the island’s bird rookery…all are fundamentally gentle characters, with streaks of quiet ferocity…and all are intertwined.

To describe the plot would be to ruin it. There is romance and pain, enduring friendship, and the strained relationship that often occurs between grown women and their mothers.

If you read The Secret Life of Bees, and liked it, than read The Mermaid Chair. Actually, read it even if you haven’t read the other.