Why is mother cutting off her fingers? How exactly did Jessie’s father die, and was it really in any way Jessie’s fault? Will Jessie divorce her husband and marry Brother Thomas? (His civilian name is Whit O’Connor, widower and Raleigh attorney whose practice was thwarting developers and industrial polluters on behalf of various conservation and environmental groups.

(One should remember that Jessie has taken hers.) As the novel progresses, we will learn the answers to several real mysteries. She falls dead in love, sexually, passionately, with a monk who has not yet taken his final vows. Jessie is not on the island very long, however, when she develops a new behavior or ritual. The story concerns a woman who upon coming home to an island off the coast of South Carolina becomes attracted to a Benedictine monk who is just a few months short of taking his final vows. After all, every sacred object was once new, and every ritual was once performed for the first time, so why not? Her second novel, The Mermaid Chair (2005), won the 2005 Quill Award for General Fiction. In “Mermaid,' the ritual is the all-girls, all-night picnic by the sea. Sue Monk Kidds The Mermaid Chairis the soulful tale of Jessie Sullivan, a middle-aged woman whose stifled dreams and desires take shape during an extended stay on Egret Island, where she is caring for her troubled mother, Nelle. She feels emotianlly lost when her role in. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and theres nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. A housewife has become passive from the every-day monontony of her life and has become board of her loving husband. It is possible, indeed desirable, to create sacred objects - not just to collect saints’ fingerbones and fragments of the true cross, but to make new sacred objects, such as a decorated turtle skull and the mermaid chair itself. Theres release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. In her novels, there are answers to be found in dreams, if they are properly understood.

Kidd believes in a variety of somewhat transcendental possibilities to be found in the everyday.

The mermaid chair by sue monk kidd