Kidd follows The Secret Life of Bees with this novel set on South Carolina's Egret Island, where a woman undergoes a mid-life crisis while caring for her mother.
Critic Reviews
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
This emotionally rich novel, full of sultry, magical descriptions of life in the South, is sure to be another hit for Kidd.
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Favorable
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Booklist Kristine Huntley
Kidd's second offering is just as gracefully written as her first and possesses an equally compelling story. [15 Feb 2005, p.1036]
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Jessica Treadway
Readers who admired ''Bees" will likely find pleasure in Kidd's new combination of legend, personal history, spirituality, and humanity in quest of its own significance.
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Favorable
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USA Today Susan Kelly
There are places in Mermaid in which the characters' assessment of their plight seems too pat, too enlightened. But these moments are far outweighed by others that ring true.
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Mixed
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Houston Chronicle Susan Balee
If Bees was a girl's coming-of-age novel, Chair is a woman's coming-of-middle-age novel. Though the plot irritated me, the prose thrilled me. Kidd can really turn a phrase, and her descriptions of nature's archetypal elements are magnificent.
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Mixed
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Kirkus Reviews
Bestselling Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees (2002) has a gift for language, but the saccharine aftertaste won't go away.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Book Review Dana Kennedy
Kidd has a flair for making us see her characters with great vividness and immediacy, but there's a hint of ''Bridges of Madison County'' sentimentality in the idyllic romance she unfolds -- and the sense of duty that may doom it.
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Mixed
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The Onion A.V. Club Tasha Robinson
The orderliness of Kidd's world is warmly reassuring, and her prose is catchy and enjoyable, especially wrapped as it is around a plot full of surprises. But her precision chafes.
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Unfavorable
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The New Republic Sacha Zimmerman
Kidd's handling of symbolism is about as subtle as a hot flash on an icy February morning: Throughout a book littered with mermaid legends, saints, and allusions to sacrifice, she still feels compelled to spoon-feed us her "theme."
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Janet Maslin
If a computer had been asked to combine romance, spirituality, nature, tourism and violent self-mutilation it might have come up with something like this.
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Unfavorable
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Try this for a batty and arresting first sentence: ''In the middle of my marriage, when I was above all Hugh's wife and Dee's mother, one of those unambiguous women with no desire to disturb the universe, I fell in love with a Benedictine monk.'' Alas, it's all downhill from there in Sue Monk Kidd's goopy follow-up to her best-selling 2002 debut, "The Secret Life of Bees."
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Unfavorable
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Washington Post Donna Rifkind
In the end, the more-is-more approach that succeeded so audaciously in "The Secret Life of Bees" can do little to rescue Kidd's new book from its own puerile, waterlogged plot.
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