I bought this book when I went with my mother to go hear Sue Monk Kidd speak. Let me tell you, she speaks as eloquently as she writes. She's also just as witty. After hearing her speak, I realized that a lot of her personality comes through in her writing. Her amazing writing.

She spoke of how she felt The Mermaid Chair was going to be often compared to The Secret Life of Bees and maybe wouldn't be able to live up to the high praise it's earned so far. She also worried about the characters being More...

Read this book as it was a selection for my book club.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed "The Secret Life Of Bees" by the same writer, I found this book to be a far different sort of read. In Bees, while I enjoyed the plot, it was the characters that I found myself hooked to. In "The Mermaid Chair" I found the plot to be only mildly entertaining and the characters lacking in development. The main character I found to be whiny, annoying, selfish, and someone I just couldn't connect to on any level. T More...

Very disappointed in this book since I loved "The Secret Life of Bees". The best thing I can say about it is that it is highly readable...an easy summer read. I believe in lust at first site, a spark that makes you want to get to know someone, etc. No matter how hard I tried, I could not wrap myself around the decision of a woman to leave a husband of 20 years and a monk to turn his back on the monastery on the basis of a first glance after which both proclaimed being in love. And if you can't b More...

This book is so corny it will pass straight through you, undigested.

I did not like this book.

That’s not entirely accurate. I loved the religious themes that ran through this book, I loved the stories of growing up on an island, I loved the Mermaid aspect of this story.

So why the rating of “did not like?” I’m really tired of stories where the lead character decides they need to drastically change their life. Then they run off through either some decision they consciously make or through some twist of fate (as in this case) to “find” themselves. While finding the More...

Dear Sue,

What were you thinking? I don’t want to be mean, but “The Mermaid Chair” isn’t your best work. Your first novel, “The Secret Life of Bees” was wonderful – full of imagery and emotion. I was expecting more of your magic, but “The Mermaid Chair” is just another novel about a middle-aged woman in a rut.

You explore some compelling ideas: marriage, infidelity, betrayal, guilt, forgiveness, grief and faith, but you don’t really add anything to that oh-so-told story. You wrap the issues in a More...

Jesse goes back home, to visit with her mother who is apparently cutting off her fingers in a rash display of abnormal behavior. While on the island, she comes across a monk that she eventually falls in love with. The problem is that Nell is married and has a grown daughter. The story goes back and forth between caring for the mother and the love affair between Nell and the monk.

It is not very well written, and at times reminded me a lot of the "Ya Ya Sisterhood". Everything seemed very "surfac More...

This probably isn't the best time to write a review of this book since I just finished it a few hours ago and am still quite upset by it. The reason I began the book was because of the name, first of all, and also the story takes place on an island right off the coast of South Carolina. I grew up in South Carolina and miss it very much and so I started reading.

The first part of the book dragged a little, although I loved the descriptions of the south and the ocean. As the book picked up I began More...

Not nearly as inspirational or moving as author's first novel, Secret Life of Bees. Although VERY well written the subject matter was not pleasing and almost distasteful. I liked the monks side of the story and can more readily understand why he did what he did. In his case he was questioning his faith, his existence, everything and was reaching out to anything that might pull him back to Life. In the woman's case, she was simply bored and unfulfilled in her marriage and was searching for self r More...

I loved this book, but reading most of the reviews, it seems like most people hated this book. I do think "The Secret Life of Bees" was better--I enjoyed the characters and storyline in Bees more so than "The Mermaid Chair."

The main character of Jessie drove me crazy sometimes because, as everyone thinks, she could be so selfish sometimes when it came to her mother and her husband. True, it's a little unbelievable Jessie would choose to pretty much ignore her mother's mental state and spend mos More...

I'll start this review by saying I usually steer clear of books with adultery. Makes me too uncomfortable. I started this audiobook not knowing it was about adultery until I was already engrossed in it. I thought to myself, it's fiction, it doesn't have to be your Pollyanna view of the world. So I kept listening to the audiobook and I'm glad I did.

First of all Eliza Foss, the narrator, was great, both Southern and male voices.

Jessie's mother has cut off her finger purposely and so Jessie goes t More...

that sue monk kid might be a one hit wonder..just joking but secrt lives of bees was an all time fav for me and i was extremely disappointed in this book. did not connect with character at all. save your money buy the second book from the author of the kite runner...he proved himself with his second novel.

terrible. Middle-life crisis dribble. It was like gargling salt water.

From a blog post I wrote in 2005:

If you've read The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd's first novel, you probably have high expectations for her latest work, The Mermaid Chair. Bees was beautifully written and made you care about the characters so much that you were sorry to have to leave them at the end of the story. I hope she writes a sequel.

Mermaid Chair has some of the same elements as Bees: quirky characters, long held secrets, romance and long time friendships. But, I didn't feel the lov More...

I really wanted to like this book and after being pleasantly surprised (and touched) by "The Secret Life of Bees" I was pretty eager to read it. Having said that, I didn't dislike it. I guess disappointed is the word. I was disappointed in the characters, the themes, the motivations and the plot overall. The characters seemed stock/shallow and a bit forced with the only believable one of the lot being the poor husband (and the friend’s “off” daughter, who was a hoot...we needed more of her) and More...

The main character in this book just seemed like a whiner to me. Boo hoo, my husband won't "let" me be myself. Ummm, let's see, is it his job to "let" you be yourself, or was that your job all your life while he was supporting the family so you could putz around decorating your lovely victorian house and messing with your little collages that never go anywhere? I found nothing wrong with her husband. He seemed like an intelligent, sensitive guy, and the minute he lets her out of his sight she bo More...

This book was really well written and compelling like all of Sue Monke Kidd's books, it's a novel about a womens sort of, coming of middle age, facing her troubled childhood, and falling in love in order to preserve the spark of energy that once lived inside her. i liked this book, but the thing that pissed me off about it was that it was still in some sort a coming of age novel about finding your true self or some shit like that. i mean the book was well thought out and everything but are comin More...

I loved "The Secret Life of Bees" so I was excited to start on this book of Sue's.

I was so disappointed. Half way through I had to just quit reading this. Not only do I care not a whit for the characters, and the affair with the monk hasn't even truly begun, but this whole catholicism centered around a mermaid/saint is just irritating to me.

How did Sue get this one so wrong? Nothing is happening and I just want the husband to come and carry his wife home, after committing his mother-in-law (min More...

I really enjoyed this book because I thought the author gave a nice twist to what seems to begin a Romance Novel. In the end, the message ends up being about the independence and self-fulfillment of the main character. I thought the colorful characters really added to what makes the novel unique...like the mentally disturbed finger hacking mother, her eccentric life-long friends, and a troop of Benedictine monks. The most important point that I took away from this read was that it's never too la More...

this book was horrid! if you want to read anything by sue monk kidd read The Secret Life of Bees that book has meaning and structure.

i thought the premise of this book, middle aged woman decides she is dissatisfied with her life so she has an affair and finds out that the "terrible" secret from her past is really actually boring, was so hackneyed i couldn't even finish reading. i skimmed to the end to find out the secret, and then laughed at the absurdity of it all.

don't bother with this book, More...

I picked this up at the faaaaabulous Reno book sale, and I'm not sure why. I really hated this same author's "The Secret Life of Bees," but I figured it'd be worth a try.

I was surprised to find that I liked it, even if it read like a mixture of the Thorn Birds and a Lifetime movie. It's about a woman in her forties who is bored with her life. Her mom, who lives back on ye olde island that the daughter never goes back to (her dad died, all kinds of bad memories, yada yada), has cut off her finge More...

After glancing over the goodreads reviews of this book, and seeing how negative they were, I was expecting to dislike, or simply feel apathy for, this book. But I really loved it, surprisingly so. I enjoyed "The Secret Life of Bees", but I didn't connect to the characters as much as I connected to Jessie in this story. This book tackles a difficult subject: how can you fall in love with someone else while still married to a wonderful man who hasn't changed? The goodreads complaints were that Jes More...

Ok this one is going to be hard to review. A year or so aga I heard some spoilers from an interview with the author of this book. I thought it sounded really psychotic. For some reason I picked it up this year. There are some elements that really bothered me. For example why does one have to have an affair to "find" yourself. On the other hand I really related to some of the emotions that the main charecter experienced. She created some art work that was her awakening and for some odd reason I r More...

This book tries hard to escape chic lit and wants to rise above that genre by including a look of psychology and deep-thinking, but it fails. On the surface the book is about Jessie trying to help her mother, Nell, through her craziness and compulsion to cut off her fingers as Nell battles her feelings about her husband's death 30+ yrs earlier. But really the book is about Jessie's search to find her identity. She'd lived with the guilt of her father's death, as a mother, as a dutiful wife, as s More...

This book felt derivative and overwrought. I really only kept reading to find out why mom chopped her finger off. I felt like it fetishized women's friendships, as even better books sometimes do (Secrets of the Ya-ya Sisterhood, etc.). I've never really understood that. I grew up in a family of all girls, and at any given time, 80-100% of my friends have been other women, but I don't see making a religion out of it, complete with arcane rituals and cultish secrecy. I was also annoyed by the whol More...

When I saw that this book was on the goodreads "unpopular" shelve, I decided to write a review on why I liked this book. I have a thing about sticking up for an underdog.

Probably the most stated reason that this book is unpopular is because readers compare and contrast it to the author's previous award winning work, The Secret Life of Bees. I think that people who loved the Secret Life must have anticipated that Monk Kidd's follow up would somehow cater to the same audience, and then they were More...