#41 The Mermaid Chair or Midlife Crisis in Six Easy Steps

I'm sorry Pandy, I got your book soggy. I challenge any hormonally functioning female to read this book and not sob*. Good Luck.

So, this book is for women, there's really no way around that fact. It's a page-turner, a love story, a middle-age manifesto and shockingly conservative all at the same time. It's not a book meant to make you think, in fact, it doesn't stand up well at all to any type of actual analysis. Once the experience of reading the book is done, the story itself fades away leaving the best parts of the book undiscussable. The value of this novel lays entirely in the emotional response it evokes in the reader at the time. I don't really read many books like that - probably I actively avoid them - so I don't have much to weigh this one against. It was good for what it was though.


*that is, unless you are exceptionally bitter and angry and would never even think about reading "the kind of tripe that women are supposed to read nowadays, omg, was that a bookclub book," etc. etc. You people can read Beloved.