Samantha Hunt

A young woman escapes her bleak life in a coastal town and her memories of her father's suicide eleven years earlier by falling in love with Jude, a sailor twice her age with a troubling secret, dreaming of becoming a scientist, and convincing herself that she is a mermaid. A first novel. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

A Novel

The Seas

Some of the most exceptional and enticing prose I've read this year. The water metaphors are refreshing and fresh. However, the content is more gruesome and graphic than I'd originally anticipated. Furthermore, I am still unpacking my opinions on the success of the feminist reclamation that I believe this book attempted. I am uncomfortable with the way female bodies, sexuality, and suffering feel fetishised in the tale, but perhaps that is the point. The discomfort of art that accurately mirrors the reality of the culture it's illustrating.

𝔢𝔪

Jennifer

A poetic and figurative novel which is open to subjective interpretations. This magic realism novel revolves around the symbolisms of ocean and mermaid. I found the thematic exploration and the writing quite well done. It's beautifully written and the imageries of ocean, colour blue, and the mermaid is really well done. 

For some reason, I had a merely average experience with The Seas. While I enjoyed the thematic explorations, I have issues with the messaging in the book. For example, I felt that the excessive escapism with alcohol and depression described is unhealthy and triggering. So I had an uncomfortable experience grinding through the escapism stuff and it was difficult for me to keep myself engaged in the story.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the magic realism and the imageries, though I feel like the escapism rubbed me the wrong way (I guess I've spoiled my reading experience reading The Seas at the wrong mood). 

tw: alcohol, drowning, death, and depression

Daryl Houston

This short, poetic book is evocative and disturbing, and unlike much else I've read. I picked up two books of Hunt's from the library this week (trying to find another that I had seen recommended here on GR, which the library didn't have), and this one was quite a find. The closest literary kin I can think of to this one is Evie Wyld's All the Birds, Singing, the specifics of which I'm fuzzy on by now but which came to mind as a sharer of unsettling weirdness.

Leafling

Mali Malzetta

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.

erin alise 

Lindsy Rice

Kelly Wynne

luca

Morgan Thomas

Jessie Kronke

Meghan Navoy

Lexie 

Ana Hein

Ashley

Jean A

"The Seas took me back to how I felt as a kid, when you're newly falling in love with literature, newly shocked by its capacity to cast a spell..." Maggie Nelson "[It] blew me away because of the beauty of the language . . . I found myself highlighting about 85% of the book for the language. It is so beautifully written" Jodi Picoult 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 Seas A Novel

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