Book Review

I just finished a book by Sue Monk Kidd called "The Mermaid Chair". This is a very good book about a woman going through, essentially, a mid-life crisis. She begins feeling restless when her only daughter goes off to college. The woman has what most would call, a very successful marriage, but the cracks are starting to show. She is an artist who has limited herself to making little art boxes. Things come to a head when she is informed that her mother has cut off her finger with a cleever.

The woman, Jessie, goes home to be with her mother on the little South Carolina barrier island where she grew up, a place she had happily escaped to go to college. Now, she must deal with her mother's possible madness,and her own confused feelings about her home, her mother, and her fathers' violent death when Jessie was 9 years old.

A very important feature is the monestery where the Mermaid Chair resides, a chair honoring its' patron Saint. She resists any help from her psychiatrist husband, in fact tells him to keep away.

We meet very colorful people from the island, and dog Max. Jessie also meets Brother Thomas, to whom she is instantly and strongly attracted. We get to know several of the other resident monks.

It is a book told with compassion and passion. Jessie finds a part of herself that she repressed at the time of her father's death. In fact, in many ways, his death is the focal point of the book. I highly reccomend it.