Moored in a coastal fishing town so far north that the highways only run south, the unnamed narrator of The Seas is a misfit. She’s often the subject of cruel local gossip. Her father, a sailor, walked into the ocean eleven years earlier and never returned, leaving his wife and daughter to keep a forlorn vigil. Surrounded by water and beckoned by the sea, she clings to what her father once told her: that she is a mermaid.
True to myth, she finds herself in hard love with a land-bound man, an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior. The mesmerizing, fevered coming-of-age tale that follows will land her in jail. Her otherworldly escape will become the stuff of legend.
With the inventive brilliance and psychological insight that have earned her international acclaim, Samantha Hunt pulls readers into an undertow of impossible love and intoxication, blurring the lines between reality and fairy tale, hope and delusion, sanity and madness.
The Review
Some books are beyond a basic review, and this is one of those. It affected me so much that I can't tell you that it's just an incredible book even though it is. I can't tell you how the characters are, whether they are fully fleshed out even though they are. This isn't a fairytale, or a retelling of a fairytale. It isn't a romance or a coming-of-age story. It isn't about mermaids or grief or what loss can do to a person. It isn't a book about madness or sanity, or how blurred the line between them can become.
I could tell you what happens, but that isn't what it is about. This book makes sense to me in a way almost no other book has. I relate to this character and her wish, her refusal to be a land-person. She is a mermaid, bottom line. This book broke my heart, made me laugh, made me cry, made me feel like this character could have been my best friend, no, more than that, we could be kindred spirits. The language is beautiful, haunting, relatable. I can't give this more than five stars but I wish I could give it all of the stars in the J-U-D-E constellation. I will have a place on my bookshelf for this one until I die, and I really think I've found my new comfort book. Fuck it, she's a mermaid.
