People in the town love to tell their life stories, which are quirky and charming. meetings, Easter egg hunts, gossip, baseball, and snow. The reader gets sucked in to the early 1960s New England small town, with its P.T.A. Then her musings seems much more natural to me. But then I realized that we all get caught up in our own thoughts, and those thoughts almost always go to weird places. Frequently the prose is full of Charlotte’s weird imaginings and fantasies, and strange anecdotes that seem only loosely connected to the point she’s trying to make, which at first I wasn’t sure about.
Character-driven rather than plot-driven, the story follows Charlotte as she tries to understand how she feels about her mother, her absent father, the handsome convent caretaker who is twice her age, what steps she can take to be more like Joan of Arc, and the reason why God hasn’t spoken to her. The language of the book is simple but smooth, and I read the entire thing in less than a day. Flax, an unconventional mother who has a hard time staying in the same town for very long.
She has a little sister, Kate, who is obsessed with swimming and has a dream of crossing the English Channel, and a mother, Mrs. The story is told by Charlotte, a fifteen year old Jewish girl who dreams of becoming a nun. Mermaids is a short and sweet coming-of-age story in the time of JFK and polka dot dresses. So any time I love a movie, now, I search to find out if it has a mother book. With a movie, it is rare for it to have the same effect twice. You can return to it over and over, revisit the words, experience things again and again. But for me, a book is something you can keep forever. A movie is a visual, auditory, emotional experience, for sure. I am a book purist, one of those people who always has to put in her two cents about movie adaptations, but I have to admit that it is truly an exciting thing when I discover that a movie I love was a book first. I found Mermaids, by Patty Dann, because I was looking up things about the movie, which, as it happens, is a guilty pleasure and one of my favorites. Perhaps this year will be the year I complete all of the unfinished books I have on the shelves.
Today was the beginning of being snowed in, so I decided, spontaneously, to finish reading a book I’d started a while ago and got sidetracked from.
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