Clica una miniatura per anar a Google Books.
S'està carregant… The Mermaid Chair (2005)de Sue Monk Kidd
S'està carregant…
Apunta't a LibraryThing per saber si aquest llibre et pot agradar. No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. Excellent story KIRKUS REVIEWAccording to Kidd?s follow-up to The Secret Life of Bees, there?s nothing like a little soulful adultery to get an anemic marriage back on track.Atlanta housewife and part-time artist Jessie Sullivan has been in a mild funk since her daughter Dee started college. Then she and her sensitive but controlling husband, Hugh, receive news that her obsessively devout mother, Nelle, has purposely cut off a finger¥whether out of misplaced piety or mental illness isn?t known. With trepidation, Jessie returns to the South Carolina barrier island where she was raised to care for Nelle. She still carries guilt that a spark from the pipe she had given her father supposedly caused the boating accident that killed him when she was nine. Since then, Nelle has cooked for the neighboring monks, whose patron saint, Saint Senare, was an Irish mermaid before she found God. Jessie meets and is immediately attracted to the newest addition to the monastery, Father Thomas. A former lawyer whose wife and unborn child died in a freak accident, Father Thomas, who has yet to take his final vows, is in charge of the rookery, so he spends his days paddling alone down various creeks. Soon, Jessie is paddling with him while delving into her own sensuality and selfhood. No pure lust, but a spiritual coupling has taken place as evidenced, at least, by the pictures she creates of a mermaid diving deep toward the ocean floor, while there?s much talk of being ?damned and saved both.? Jesse learns she isn?t to blame for her father?s death, but her relief is short-lived, since Nelle cuts off another finger. Loyal Hugh shows up to help and discovers Jessie?s affair. Once the truth of Jessie?s father?s death is revealed, Nelle begins a real recovery, while a wiser, stronger Jessie returns to the ever-patient Hugh, who vows to be a better husband.Bestselling Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees (2002) has a gift for language, but the saccharine aftertaste won?t go away. My thoughts about this book are on Booklikes at http://sheric.booklikes.com/post/797077/the-mermaid-chair- I'm very torn over this book. Well, I went into reading it already torn...having adored The Secret Life of Bees but very apprehensive about this main character. As it turned out, try as I might, the main character (Jessie) just wasn't someone I could like. I understood her life challenges, really I did, but I thought she was too selfish, too self-centered, blind, fully lacking any wisdom a 42 year old woman should have gained and really freaking lucky in the end. She also reminded me *very* much of someone who was in our lives, married into our family, and all the hurt and confusion she left behind when she choose to find her own "solitude of being." In that way she became more real, and her choices more personal. Also personal was the fact that Jessie had lost her father at the same age I lost mine...so that thread I could identify with to an extent. I loved the setting...the island life, the quirkiness of the other individual characters who shaped the story, the religious and mythological themes woven throughout. I could smell the marsh, hear the birds, the ancient roots reverberating through the fog, the monks silences. I wanted Nelle to be the main character mostly...she was intriguing, full of tragic grace and had the better story to tell. So...if I were basing my rating on Jessie and her story, the book would get 2 stars but I took it as a whole and gave it 4. Sue Monk Kidd is wonderful at writing imagery and she tells a story well.
Forty-three-year old Jessie Sullivan is pulled out of her staid life in Atlanta with her husband and daughter, back to her childhood home on Egret Island after her mother, Nelle, cuts off one of her own fingers. Jessie has been uneasy with the island since her beloved father died when she was nine in a boating accident, a tragedy Jessie has always felt partially responsible for. At the behest of her mother's best friend, Jessie journeys back to the island to try to reconnect with the mother she's never been close to. Jessie wants to know what drove her obviously disturbed mother to sever her finger, and she thinks Father Dominic, one of the Benedictine monks who resides in a nearby monastery, might know more about her mother's state of mind. But it is another monk who claims Jessie's attention--handsome Brother Thomas, who ignites in Jessie a passion so intense it overwhelms her, leading her to question her marriage and rediscover her artistic drive. Contingut aTé l'adaptacióPremisDistincions
Inside the abbey of a Benedictine monastery on tiny Egret Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. Jessie Sullivan's conventional life has been "molded to the smallest space possible." So when she is called home to cope with her mother's startling and enigmatic act of violence, Jessie finds herself relieved to be apart from her husband, Hugh. Jessie loves Hugh, but on Egret Island-- amid the gorgeous marshlands and tidal creeks--she becomes drawn to Brother Thomas, a monk who is mere months from taking his final vows. What transpires will unlock the roots of her mother's tormented past, but most of all, as Jessie grapples with the tension of desire and the struggle to deny it, she will find a freedom that feels overwhelmingly right. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
Debats actualsCapCobertes populars
Google Books — S'està carregant… GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:
Ets tu?Fes-te Autor del LibraryThing. |