The Seas

By: Samantha Hunt, Maggie Nelson - introduction

Narrated by: Samantha Hunt

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 11 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 13 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 listeners into an undertow of impossible love and intoxication, blurring the lines between reality and fairy tale, hope and delusion, sanity and madness.

©2004 Samantha Hunt (P)2019 Tantor

Written so beautifully.

CYGApro

Such a beautiful story. Written so interestingly and cleverly. Finding beauty in the sad parts of humanity. An important story to have been, very glad I found it.

Enchanting !!!!

I absolutely love this book, it’s well written, beautiful, melodic and enchanting, needs more than one listening

An impression

The lyrical vision of the author. How things that seem to have hard outlines can become smudged and how exacting word meanings can become shifted slightly into an impressionists view of a small ice locked town full of poverty and pain into something more

A mad, headlong, first novel.

In a cold, dreary seaport, a young woman (the narrator) is in love with an alcoholic soldier.
Her mother wants her to escape all this but there's a complication. Her daughter believes herself a mermaid.

How to make a person of yourself when drenched in grief and loss

How else to convey this experience than through constellations of subjectivity.
Would be much better for this and all books to place lit crit AFTER the book’s conclusion, rather than as an intro, where it can only irritate and spoil the reader’s clean dive into this ocean.