The Seas

The Seas

3.8 of 5 stars 3.80  ·  rating details  ·  405 ratings  ·  80 reviews
The narrator of The Seas lives in a tiny, remote, alcoholic, cruel seaside town. An occasional chambermaid, granddaughter to a typesetter, and daughter to a dead man, awkward and brave, wayward and willful, she is in love (unrequited) with an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior. She is convinced that she is a mermaid. What she does to ease the pain of growing up lan...more
Paperback, 193 pages
Published December 27th 2005 by Picador (first published 2004)
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Lola Wallace
Some notes while reading

1. I was drawn to this book because I liked Hunt's contribution to Tin House's Fantastic Women issue, a short story entitled "Beast." I spent the first hundred pages of The Seas wishing she had stuck to the shorter format--it is repetitive in a way that is not especially lyrical or insightful but just gives the feeling that she didn't have enough ideas for sustained novel. But then she threw in the story about the narrator being furniture for a ship's captain. And Jude's...more
Powells.com
The Little Mermaid Grows Up
A review by Alexis Smith

Samantha Hunt has written a layered debut novel, part fairy tale, part bildungsroman, and part meditation on the imprecision of language. It is a story that will sound vaguely familiar: a girl grows up in a small town, with its small town locales (laundromat, shipyard, shabby houses), its small town occupations (primarily drinking), and its small town tragedies (men lost at sea). In this setting, the unnamed narrator longs to escape her dreary e...more
Malcolm
"Yet when she comes to earth she comes to seek for that without which her beauty will be forever cold, cold and chill as the surge of the salt, salt sea." -- Mary MacGregor in her telling of "Undine."

Samantha Hunt's dark, yet often whimsical, 2004 novel "The Seas" draws on the classic mythology of mermaids and mortals. The alchemist Paracelsus (1493-1521) theorized that Ondines were elemental water nymphs. According to legends, Ondines (or Undines) had no souls unless they married mortal men. Fr...more
Jane
A strange one this.

A debut novel longlisted for the Orange Prize two years after its author’s second novel was longlisted for the very same prize. There is no question over the books eligibility as it was first published in the United Kindom in July last year, but it does feel odd.

And the book itself has a certain strangeness.

“One night,” I begin and close my eyes, “my father, he was very handsome, he walked into the ocean. That was eleven years ago. He hasn’t come back though and even though th...more
John Grinstead
Hmmm. Difficult to know what to make of this really. We have a first person narration from a girl who is heavily influenced by the dreariness of her small town existance and the feeling of being different - she believes herself to be a mermaid - and her desperation to fulfil her infatuation with Jude, a war veteran suffering his own post-traumatic depression from Iraq. Jude emerged from the sea when she was sitting on the beach at the spot where her father disappeared and so filled a void - or a...more
Tze-Wen
Apparently, living out harsh lives in the small town leads to excessive alcohol-consumption and depression, and poor Jude is no exception to the rule. If you're not trying to escape reality by drinking, you have to immerse yourself in other pastimes. The girl's mother, who grew up on an island with mostly deaf people, loves contemplating in silence. The protagonist's grandfather enjoys perusing dictionaries and finding the origin of and connections between words. And in a way, both of them find...more
Elliott
The Seas is told by a 19 year old narrator struggling to move from adolescence to adulthood. Drawing on classical mythology and fairy tales, such as Undine and The Little Mermaid, Samantha Hunt weaves a tale that can be magical, funny, dark, and often hauntingly beautiful. Like the stories from which this one derives, the narrator finds herself deep in longing for her love of an older man but also fears that her love will bring about his death. All the while, she still looks to the sea for her f...more
Lucinda
Modern Gothic - when I first read this description of The Seas I thought, 'what does that mean?' in typical skeptical fashion.
I guess I started this book out skeptical, not liking the beginning much at all. It read too much like a complicated kindness: morose teenager with parent that disappeared/ abandoned the dysfunctional family/ community. I rarely enjoy coming of age novels.
But then the book turned into something else entirely, as the protagonists already somewhat befuddled mind crumbles un...more
Carly
This is a beautiful, beautifully written novel that reads like a poem. The problem is when authors resort to surrealism that I find it hard to take any of the story seriously or take it as real. It all feels made up or hallucination, so I can't attach to it as a reader. And the end is disappointing. I like to be left with something, for something to make sense or to tie the threads together. Did she kill herself? Was it all her imagination?

The writing is beautiful, so I hope the author will prov...more
Jason
The Seas was an extraordinary novel by Samantha Hunt. It is told in the first person by a 19 year-old woman living in an unnamed small, northern seaside town with only one road leaving it (to the South, the road does not continue north). We are told the town has the highest rate of alcoholism in the country and it appears to be up there in suicide, accidental death, depression, insanity and cruelty as well.

The lyrical and spellbinding story is narrated by a 19 year-old girl (she does not seem an...more
Courtney
4 stars (as of 4/19/12). This book really grew on me in an impressive way. At first, I was stuck in comparison mode, which made me very conscious of the similarities between The Seas and Samantha Hunt's other novel, The Invention of Everything Else. I still prefer Invention to The Seas, but I really have to respect Hunt for writing a novel like The Seas.

Basically, it's about an unnamed 19 year old girl/woman (she's liminal in many respects, not just in terms of maturity) who is locked in a very...more
Gayla Bassham
So here is what I thought when I finished this book:
1. Samantha Hunt is prodigiously talented and I am very much looking forward to seeing what she does next.
2. This is not actually a very good novel.

There's some really good stuff here and some really choppy, disconnected stuff. I believe this is the first book that Hunt wrote and it shows. There's some good writing here and Hunt shows a lot of promise, but I'm not sure what it's doing on the Orange longlist. I can't believe this is one of the t...more
Nita
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
AJ LeBlanc
I like settings near the ocean. Not tropical, warm water oceans. Icy cold, grey water, you’re-going-to-die oceans. Settings where the sea itself becomes a character and changes the people that live nearby. I like the violence, the way the water affects the weather and how the weather changes the waves. There is power in the sea and characters can’t change it if they fight it. You either let the water change you or you leave.

Our nameless narrator is nineteen years old and she’s convinced she’s a...more
Buried In Print
Samantha Hunt’s debut begins: “The highway only goes south from here.” You might think that this will be a linear tale. But no, by the end of the first four pages, it’s obvious that there is nothing clear and simple about this story.

It is not a quiet day at sea, with the tide dribbling up and down the shore like an infant’s shallow breathing in a delicate, wakeful sleep. It’s a rush of water, waves crashing like they do in the trailer for “From Here to Eternity”, a cacophony like a monstrous man...more
E. Anderson
What I love most about this book is its insane romanticism - not insane because it's romantic, but romantic because it's insane. Hunt's narrator has a special idealism in the face of imminent tragedy, and has convinced herself that she is a mermaid. The doomed love affair with a (much older) Gulf War vet and the isolated, coastal ship-building town add to the desolate landscape of this story that is absolutely unforgettable.
Nykki
A strange tale that I wouldn't have picked out personally (my husband works in a library and picks them out for me lol). But still one I wanted to finish. I felt if the book had been longer it would have totally lost me but I wanted to find out how much of what was happening was actually real and how much was in this girls head. Quite a depressing outlook for what society can do to you.
Vicky
The Seas is a lyrical tale told by an unnamed narrator on the cusp between adulthood and adolescence, as she slowly drifts away from reality and into the rough waters of mental illness. She is an outsider in her northern coastal town, unable to come to terms with the drowning of her father when she was a child, and creates her own narrative to her detachment; a mermaid awaiting the return of her father from the ocean.

This draws her into the obsessive love of a father-substitute, Jude, a veteran...more
Leah Evans
A beautiful haunting book. The story is so lyrical and descriptive that it filled my imagination. At the beginning of the book, I just thought the protagonist was crazy in her belief of being a mermaid... And then I started believing her. The way author makes you slowly second guess what the truth is novel. Thank you for the ecperience!
Beverly
While at times repetitive and too disjointed, not in a way that seemed under the control of the author, to satisfy me, the lyric storytelling and references to myths ultimately makes it a book I would recommend to the more imaginative among my reading friends.
Chris
I thought the narration of the main character in this book was phenomenal. Another thing that floored me was the author's way with words and the sentences she was able to construct.

I dunno, this was a very very strange story and book, but it spoke to me.
Chelsea
What a bizarre book this was.

I think I would have liked it more if I read this and then 'The Invention of Everything Else'- but luckily at least this was written before, so it's easier to forgive it.

I liked the characters, it was well-written, and so I can't put my finger on what didn't totally win me over other than that it's just SO WEIRD. It's kind of bleak and depressing and I never quite made up my mind on whether or not I agreed with the main conceit of the book and just kind of couldn't...more
Erin
This book felt incredibly puerile in both tone, plot, and story length. This is the shortest book I almost didn't finish. Hated it. One star because it exists and the premise isn't bad, but was handled the way a 15 year old would handle a plot line.
Jenee
Um I think I really liked it? This book was interesting it was written beautifully, there were sentences through out that just made you want to dream. It skirted on the line between reality and fantasy and at the end you aren't too sure which is which. This book reminded me a lot of the novel Big Fish, it also reminded me of freak shows and the kind of toys and objects you would find in an ISpy book.
Elizabeth
I got this one from BookMooch after thoroughly enjoying Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else earlier this summer. The Seas was hypnotic and intense, repetitive in an undulating sort of way, lovely enough that I read it in one pass on my flight to Atlanta, then gave the book to my seatmate on my return flight home. Others have compared it to Francesca Lia Block's work, or to magical realism, and I think both are fair descriptions.

I wish I'd written this closer to finishing the book, but I was...more
Terri Jacobson
A story about a young woman in a coastal small town who thinks she is a mermaid and is in love with an older man. Interesting writing.
Sarah
Pretty bizarre. The narrator is like fo rills crazy. But it was short and interesting and kind of sucked me in, so I liked it quite a lot.
Lorna
An odd little book. The unreliability of the seemingly mentally troubled narrator coupled with the brief, dreamlike chapters made for a much more fluid reading experience than I'm used to (ha, appropriate since she thinks she's a mermaid). It didn't really work for me, but I appreciated the risk Hunt took with the unusual style.
Donna Irwin
Beautifully written, sad account of life in a depressed northern town in America. Sad, but powerful.
Bridgette Guerzon Mills
Very odd book, but beautifully written. Depressing. But despite all that I really like it!
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The Seas (Paperback)
The Seas (Hardcover)
The Seas: A Novel (Kindle Edition)
The Seas (ebook)
Nixenkuss (Paperback)

190905
Samantha Hunt was born in 1971 in Pound Ridge, New York, the youngest of six siblings. She was raised in a house built in 1765 which wasn't haunted in the traditional sense but was so overstuffed with books— good and bad ones— that it had the effect of haunting Hunt all the same. Her mother is a painter and her father was an editor. In 1989 Hunt moved to Vermont where she studied literature, print...more
More about Samantha Hunt...
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