Keri's view of The Mermaids Singing

I had a completely different reaction to this book. I really liked it and found it to be quite beautiful, yet sad. I felt that the author really captured the deep feeling of each main character and I could really empathize with how and why they made the choices they did.

Cliona seemed to have had a hard life with a beloved and affectionate father, but a difficult and lonely mother who seemed to have no interest in her children or anything else. She loved Ireland, but needed more and thought that America could bring her that. She got sucked up into the drama and dysfunction of the Willoughby family and due to her love for their son, and the birth of her daughter, stayed far longer than intended. Taking the opportunity to go back to Ireland and marry Marcus was a good choice for Cliona, but quite a challenge for her daughter. Though she lived quite content and happy in Ireland she was never able to show her daughter the affection that it seems she desperately needed.

Grace was a headstrong and passionate woman from the day she was born. She needed love and attention that she sadly did not receive from her parents and mistakenly believed men could give her. It continued as a pattern throughout her life that may have "worked" for her in the short term, never fulfilled her completely. She never really understood her mother and the choices she made...sadly her mother never shared more of herself, and just as sadly Grace never asked and eventually it was much too late. Moving to Ireland was perhaps the very best and also the very worst thing that happened to her. She was very angry, very sad, and very desperate to be out on her own and so was never able to accept or believe the affection and acceptance that her new family was giving her. Even when she met and fell in love with Seamus she could never trust his love to be enough. She wanted more and felt captive on his beloved island. The birth of her daughter Grainne was a turning point, but not enough to keep her in a life she could not accept for herself. But their relationship began to provide the unconditional love and acceptance she craved. I felt so sad that she and Grainne never reconciled before her death, but felt that fear kept them from each other.

Grainne was caught in both worlds, though much of the time I don't think she realized this. She loved her mother desperately, yet was so afraid of how much her mother had changed that it kept her from being close at the end. Then the feelings of sadness, guilt, depression and anger kept her from accepting the family she was brought back into in Ireland. I get that it was kind of creepy that she was "in love" with her mother's boyfriend, but felt that it had more to do with her age and the feelings of puberty/growing womanhood and her desire to be like her mother and I was certainly glad that Stephen did not fall for her attempted seduction. I liked the slow relationship she built with Liam and think she needed him to be patient with her although that was not what she wanted. I really didn't find it weird that they made out in the hospital...it was only then that Grainne actually decided to start living and not trying to die. She made the choice to move on, the choice to finally eat food, and it was only then that she could really appreciate what Liam had to offer her and it wouldn't have been as important had he fallen for her shallow seduction at the beginning. I loved and was also saddened when she discovered the photograph of her at age 5 in her father's study and then later realized she had met him long ago. I had hope that her relationship with her father had a good beginning and would develop into the loving bond that had been there when she was a child.

I felt so sad for Seamus as I learned more about his relationship with Grace and how very much he loved her. With her death, he most certainly would never get her back. But I was reminded of the saying "If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it is yours forever. If it does not, it never was." He loved Grace so much, yet always knew she would leave him. I think he knew that morning when he left that she would be leaving and he allowed her freedom....heartbreaking, yet touching. I liked that they gave a sense that perhaps Seamus and Mary Louise might get together...they would never have the passionate relationshiop he had with Grace, but it would be a deep content love for each other and the island they both loved...much like Cliona and Marcus.

All in all, I liked the book a lot. I loved the beautiful descriptions of Ireland, the sea, the mermaids and wished to hear the lyrical tune of the Irish people. It was a sad book, but full of deep emotion that resonated with me. I like happily ever afters as much as anyone, but books like this with a real-life ending please me just as much. Nothing is perfect, but there is the sense that it will get better.

Kelly's Take on "The Mermaids Singing"

This whole book depressed the heck out of me. The premise is great – three generations of women, mother/daughter relationships, difficult life situations, each woman returning to Ireland (which I love) – but as their stories played out, they were so focused on sex and hopelessness that I finished the book quickly just so I wouldn’t have to be invested in it anymore. I can’t tell if this is a real or accurate portrayal of life, but I surely didn’t relate.

Cliona, the grandmother, loves her Irish home, but moves to America to be educated. She takes a job to make ends meet, gets pregnant and ends up staying at that job for far too long. The family she works for starts out decent, but ends up dysfunctional. Her daughter appears to hate her from her early childhood (which I don’t understand) – if that’s the only life she knew, what would make her look down on her mom for choosing that life? After all the drama with her daughter, she finally gets to go home to Ireland, meets and marries a man who loves her and cares for her, and makes a decently happy life there (though the author can’t let her life be really happy – and so points out that she really doesn’t love her husband). She was raised Catholic (very strictly in Ireland, less so in America, then back to Ireland) and does her best to be “religious.” But really, her so-called faith doesn’t seem to help her at all.

Grace, the daughter, was born and raised in the home of her mother’s employers. She apparently thought much of herself from the very beginning and chose to look down on her mom right away. She hated her mother’s employers (especially the wife) and seems to do everything to make life difficult for those she doesn’t like. She sleeps with the son of the house, though nothing comes of that relationship except hardship – she too ends up pregnant and discarded. (As I mentioned before, that whole family is also dysfunctional: mother goes mad, father has affairs, son sleeps with Grace then ditches her, etc.) She is forced to move to Ireland with her mom where she loses the baby, is depressed and angry, forces away the love/friendship offered to her by her step-sister (the one seemingly happy character in the book), marries a local man (much older than herself) and has a child with him, then leaves, spends the rest of her life sleeping with just about any man who offers, has an interesting relationship (more like friends than mother/daughter) with Grainne, gets cancer and dies estranged from Grainne because they can’t seem to deal with the cancer issue (I’m guessing here – I really couldn’t figure out why their once great relationship disintegrated). Grace hates the Catholic church and doesn’t have anything to do with it as soon as she’s old enough to decide for herself. Obviously her “faith” does no good for her either.

Grainne had a decent childhood in Ireland – loved by her father and grandparents, then taken away at a young age to live with her mom in America. She finally lets go of the idea of having her dad around, and becomes “best friends” with her mom. She sees all the relationships and apparently aspires to be just as promiscuous as her mother. We have here the sicko fascination she has with her mom’s boyfriends, too. When her mom dies, she tries to have a relationship with her mom’s last boyfriend, but ends up moving to Ireland with her grandmother instead. She, too, is depressed and angry there, and wants to meet her father, who avoids her. She starves herself in the meanwhile. Finally, she tracks him down and they start to have what seems to be a decent relationship (after her stint in the hospital because of the anorexia). Then there’s her love interest, her “cousin” (not really related by blood), who apparently thinks she’s really sexy starved to death and in the hospital, because they make out there. (Weird, in my book.) Raised by her mom who hated the church, Grainne doesn’t have need for it either.

So, I guess what bothers me most (besides the almost constant focus on sex) is that there is little to no hope in the book. Though it ends “okay” (Grainne and her dad reunited), that’s not the focus. Family doesn’t give hope/meaning, love and/or sex doesn’t give hope/meaning, church/faith doesn’t give hope/meaning. I guess in that sense the book makes a little sense to me – without a living, personal faith in Christ, nothing fills the voids that life has. Nothing is firm, permanent, secure or hopeful without God. I get that. But it doesn’t make the whole story worthwhile to me.

Keri's pick

Since it would have been my choice next, I'll pick a book. I've chosen The Mermaids Singing by Lisa Carey. It's been on my to-read list on goodreads for awhile. Hopefully we all enjoy it. Kelly - I'll request a copy for you through interlibrary loan. Looking forward to what we all think. :)

Its almost March

Hello girls! its almost march and i'm getting ready to read again. I've lost track of where we left off. but I figure I was the one that bailed. So I'll go third in selecting books. So Kelly or Keri, pick a book. Look forward to getting going again. Aunt Annette

Hi there

I apologize for being so out of circulation. You know...the move and everything. I'm giving myself permission to take a book break until March 1st. Then I'll be back for more great discussions. If that works for you, we will reconvene then.

love you both,
Annette

Rainbow's End - Keri's thoughts

It took me quite awhile to get through this book. Not that it wasn't interesting in parts, but life just got in the way quite a bit in the past month or so. I appreciated the different perspective that this book gave me and the information about living in Africa during that time.

I enjoyed the descriptions of the land, the people, and the detail in her stories. There were some really raw and intense descriptions as well, but through it all you could feel her love for Africa.

Here are some quotes that resonated with me:

• "Camilla had found it difficult to come to terms with the realization that an entire family, bonded tightly by love and memories, could be devastated at the speed of a bullet."
• "I used a Magic Marker to write the name of my country decoratively on my school books, beside the pictures of horses and hearts containing pop stars' initials. Charm, Donny Osmond, and Rhodesia, my first loves."
• quote from Beryl Markham - "if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are buried deep, leave it in any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can."
• "...the strutting cheerfulness of the fat red hens was that of chubby, big-bottomed African women who not only rejoice in the build nature has given them but celebrate it with impromptu bouts of tribal dancing."
• regarding the crash of the Viscount Hunyani during the war - "One listens, and the silence is deafening. One listens for loud condemnation by the President of the United States, himself a man from the Bible-Baptist belt, and once again the silence is deafening. One listens for condemnation by the Pope, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, by all who love the name of God. Again, the silence is deafening."
• "But these measures were psychological more than anything. The reassured us that, if nothing else, we were delaying the inevitable, and they told the terrorists that there were a few more barriers in place than there had been on the night when they were able to walk unchallenged up to the house and change its history."
• "Whereas in the city my parents might have closeted me and fretted about my safety, here in the place of greatest danger, they handed me my freedom and trusted me to use it wisely."
• "More often that not a rainbow would arch over the game park or the river: God's promise. Those were the times I felt most fully alive, most part of the rhythms and cycles of Africa and our new home. I felt like we belonged to the land and the land belonged to us."
• "The war of my experience was more like the battleground of the Old West, where lone ranchers defended themselves against shadowy but well-armed assassins who came in deadly bands of three or six or ten."
• "Or there'd be a Monkey's Wedding, a teasing sprinkle of rain from an incongruously sunny sky, followed by an out-of-context rainbow."
• "Dad never took war personally. As far as he was concerned, they tried to shoot you and you tried to shoot them: end of story. But he had an old-fashioned perspective on the morality of it. He would lose his temper, even with senior officers, if he felt that prisoners of war or the dying from either side were not accorded the proper respect."
• quote from Neville Chamberlain - "Failure only begins when you leave off trying."
• "The part about war that nobody mentions is how quickly it assimilates into everyday life. After a while it seemed as if there'd never been a time when we didn't scour the farm roads for land mines or steel ourselves for bullets through the windshield as we drove into town. As if there had never been an evening when my father didn't strip and clean his guns after dinner or count his ammunition. As if there had always been people waiting in the darkness to kill us."
• "All my life I'd been taught to value and hold sacred the name of Rhodesia and the history and blood ties that bonded me to it. I'd been raised on the belief that ours was the very best country on earth...and that because these things were so special, they were worth fighting for and worth dying for...and because we were told these things so often and saw all of this beauty and courage and magnificence with our own eyes, our land became our life, our nationality our identity. Now my identity was gone, and the shock was overwhelming."
• "But it was the euphoria that told me that the war of freedom, which in my childish innocence I had believed we were fighting against Communism, had turned out to be someone else's war of freedom. We were the terrorists. Our heroes were not heroes at all, they were evil racists. Only black people were allowed to be heroes. The sense of disillusionment I felt was total. The country I had loved so much that at times I almost wished I could die for it was not the country I had thought it was. We had repressed people, oppressed people, tortured people, and murdered people for the worst of possible reasons: the color of their skin. Twenty thousand people had died in our war, apparently for nothing."
• "...concluded that my whole life was a lie. I'd been brainwashed politically and blind in almost every other way, and I had to reprocess everything from that position. The trouble with having your eyes forcibly opened is that there's no way of closing them again. I felt I'd been snapped from a happy dream, from a beautiful illusion, as if a crevasse had opened up underfoot. I began to take stock of my life, and I didn't like what I saw."
• "So where did this leave me? Was my love of the land any less valid because of the actions of my forefathers, my government, my father, or even, in my ignorance, myself? In Britain and the United States, people were accepted as British or American from the moment of their birth or the day they were granted citizenship; yet in Zimbabwe black people were Africans, Indians were Indians, adn whites were regularly labeled Europeans. My family had been in Africa for four generations. Why wasn't I African? Why?
• about her father - "...because the thing I'd never doubted was how proud he was of me, even though almost everything he'd ever watched me do had been a disaster; how he had always been there for me in all the ways that mattered; and how, in one way or another, he was always saving us, Lisa and me."

New Pick

Since I haven't bought the other book yet I thought I'd try a different pick instead. Let's do Rainbow's End by Lauren St. John. It's available on Kindle and hopefully it'll be in your library out there, Aunt Annette, since it's a little bit older. My friend Amanda bought me the book a while ago and I haven't had a chance to read it yet. Does this work for everyone?