Synopses & Reviews
Ever since her father walked into the ocean eleven years ago, a young woman waits for him to return. Life in her coastal town is decidedly bleak. Her mother spends her time quietly monitoring the ocean for her missing husband. Her grandfather passes the days typesetting dictionaries that will never be printed.
Rather than suffer the contortions of becoming a woman and accepting her father's apparent suicide, the narrator convinces herself she is a mermaid and escapes her dreary, northern town life via a fantastic myth.
When not chambermaiding at decrepit motels and dreaming of becoming a scientist, she dedicates her time to falling obsessively in love with Jude, a drinker and a sailor twice her age who bears more than a passing similarity to her father. She knows Jude has a troubling secret that will, when revealed, help to fulfill the narrator's peculiar sense of her identity.
Part modern gothic, part coming-of-age story, The Seas explores the very real possibilities in the unreal, straddling the horizons between the ocean and the land; literature and science; wishing and reality.
Review
"An odd and fabulous tale....A cross between Rosamunde Pilcher's Coming Home and R.A. Dick's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, this is a beautifully unconventional story." Library Journal
Review
"Samantha Hunt writes as if her pen were a sable paintbrush....There is an ethereal quality to her vibrant prose, which fluctuates between the earthly and mythical worlds of the main characters mind....The Seas is a mesmerizing story, one that draws you in like a soft September undertow." Patricia D. Weisgerber, SmallSpiralNotebook
Review
"Hunt's precise and intense prose, her vivid and unexpected images, often read like poetry. This inventive tale of a mermaid's search for a voice is testament to the success of a writer who has found her own." Albertina Antognini, San Diego Union-Tribune
Review
"Samantha Hunt's rookie novel, The Seas, reads as though Gordon Lish had undergone a magic-realist implant, John Hawkes had sprouted Marquezian wings, Raymond Carver had lived to see Prozac proliferate....Twin Peaks meets Northern Exposure." Daniel Asa Rose, New York Observer