Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION MIL | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION MIL | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
On the grounds of a Caribbean island resort, newlyweds Deb and Chip--our opinionated, skeptical narrator and her cheerful jock husband who's friendly to a fault--meet a marine biologist who says she's sighted mermaids in a coral reef.
As the resort's "parent company" swoops in to corner the market on mythological creatures, the couple joins forces with other adventurous souls, including an ex-Navy SEAL with a love of explosives and a hipster Tokyo VJ, to save said mermaids from the "Venture of Marvels," which wants to turn their reef into a theme park.
Mermaids in Paradise is Lydia Millet's funniest book yet, tempering the sharp satire of her early career with the empathy and subtlety of her more recent novels and short stories. This is an unforgettable, mesmerizing tale, darkly comic on the surface and illuminating in its depths.
Author Notes
Lydia Millet is the author of Omnivores and George Bush, Dark Prince of Love. She lives in Tucson, Arizona and New York City.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. Absurdity and paranoia permeate the latest novel from Millet (Pulitzer Prize finalist for Love in Infant Monkeys). The book follows a newlywed couple on their honeymoon at a resort in the Caribbean. Deb and Chip embody the modern American dream: they float above life, buoyed by career success, good looks, and booze. A couple of days into their vacation, a marine biologist, Nancy, disrupts their getaway when she chances upon a group of mermaids in the resorts coral reef. After dispelling initial doubts, Nancy insists that the small crew that found the mer (politically correct nomenclature is key) proceeds with caution. She fears that if the information is leaked, hoards of reporters will descend on the island, endangering the mermaids and their reef home. Panic ensues when Nancy dies the following day in a suspicious drowning incident, and soon after media teams and soldiers flood the island. The original snorkel crew (Deb, Chip, a Freudian scholar, a Japanese VJ, a jaded academic) brainstorms how to save the mythical creatures-namely with videos, social media, and celebrity connections. In an era of uncharted connectivity, Millet comically deflates clear-cut distinctions between truth, fiction, and moral high ground. With equal parts calculated wryness and pleading earnestness, she delivers a thrilling piece of fabulist fiction. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A Caribbean honeymoon turns into a media circus over a mermaid sighting in this laser-focused satire from Millet (Magnificence, 2012, etc.). Deborah, the narrator of Millet's smart and funny novel, her ninth, is an LA woman who's snarky to the core: She's skeptical of her fiance's hard-core workout regimen, of the rituals of bachelorette parties, even of her best friend's own snark. So when her new husband, Chip, proposes a honeymoon in the British Virgin Islands, she's suspicious of tourism's virtues. Deb's early interactions seem to justify her defensiveness: One man gets the wrong idea when she accidentally brushes her foot against his leg over drinks: "He made me feel like my toes were prostitutes," she tells her husband. "Like my toes, Chip, were dolled up in Frederick's of Hollywood." The comic, unbelieving tone Millet gives Deb helps sell what happens next: Roped into a scuba dive by an aquatic researcher, she and a small group spot a bunch of mermaids at a nearby reef. Despite the group's efforts to keep the discovery hidden, the resort gets the news and rushes to capitalize on it, while Deb and her cohorts are eager to preserve the sole example of unadulterated wonder the 21st century has offered them. The novel has the shape and pace of a thrillerDeb is held by corporate goons, the researcher goes mysteriously missing, paramilitary men are called inand it thrives on Deb's witty, wise narration. Millet means to criticize a rapacious culture that wants to simplify and categorize everything, from the resort profiteers to churchy types who see the mermaids as symbols of godlessness. The ending underscores the consequences of such blinkered mindsets without losing its essential comedy. An admirable example of a funny novel with a serious message that works swimmingly. Dive in. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Millet (Magnificence, 2012) extends her run of audaciously imaginative and emotionally complex fiction propelled by ecological concerns in this satirical novel of big trouble in paradise. Deborah, the acidly witty, relentlessly critical, and fiercely unsentimental narrator, marries her opposite, Chip, a hunky sweetheart crazy about fantasy videogames. They honeymoon in a luxurious Virgin Islands resort, where she gets motion sickness in the floating restaurant, and outgoing Chip befriends a motley bunch, including Nancy, a tenacious marine biologist. Deborah's true nature begins to emerge when Nancy recruits them for a clandestine diving expedition to confirm her astounding discovery: actual mermaids are living along the reef. Despite her attempt to enforce secrecy, word gets out; a mermaid frenzy, including the mobilization of religious hysterics, ensues; and Nancy, a strong swimmer, somehow drowns in her bathtub. Was she murdered by the resort's corporate management in a vicious move to capitalize on the ultimate tourist magnet? Millet, devilishly funny, unnervingly incisive, and toughly compassionate, strips bare our conflicts of conscience about our dire abuse of the biosphere, then delivers a truly shocking finale.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
By RENE STEINKE IT'S A bold move to make mermaids the center of a grown-up story, even in a novel as hilariously funny as this one. But Lydia Millet's novels raise the bar for boldness. Through the window of the unlikeliest events or plot twists, she poses the questions many contemporary writers shy away from, or simply skirt: What's going to happen to the earth? How do we know what to believe? What are the costs of irony? In Millet's recent trilogy, "How the Dead Dream," "Ghost Lights" and "Magnificence," a successful entrepreneur finds himself haunting zoos at night, an I.R.S. agent goes on a quixotic quest in a Central American jungle and a guilt -ridden widow inherits a mansion full of taxidermy treasures. In each case, wonderfully strange incidents are woven into the very fabric of the mundane, transforming how we see ordinary life. In her new book, "Mermaids in Paradise," the narrator, Deb, a cheerfully skeptical, socially conscious business executive, and her new husband, Chip, are on their honeymoon in the Caribbean when they become entangled in a scandal surrounding an apparent drowning in a hotel bathtub and the sighting of mermaids, with "their pale backs and shining tails, the weaving, waving cloud/streams of their yellow-green hair." A former member of the Navy SEALs and a hip Japanese V.J. join them in the fight against the insane greed of a large corporation that wants to capture the mermaids and put them in a theme park. Millet's writing - witty, colorful, sometimes poetic - is, line by line, a joy to read, and her storytelling is immensely compelling. But there's always an equally compelling philosophical discussion humming beneath everything. In "Mermaids in Paradise" that discussion is about the different ways people see the world, and how perceptions form belief. Chip, an earnest jock, idealizes "Middle Americans," their love of cruises, their children's homemade toys, their knowledge of grain production. He spends his free time playing video games. Deb's best friend, Gina, on the other hand, is a self -described "failed academic" (who calls this phrase redundant), so full of irony that "everything's performance art with her." Chip and Gina represent opposite ways of seeing the world, and Deb, influenced by both, finds herself somewhere in between. Deb's humor, empathy and insight make this story disarmingly funny, but "Mermaids in Paradise" is also an ambitious exploration of belief. When Chip first reports that he's seen the mermaids, Deb feels separated from him, lonely. "I wanted the old Chip back, the Chip for whom there was real life on the one hand, without mythic creatures, and video games solidly on the other hand, where mythic creatures cavorted quite abundantly." She gropes for logical explanations - LSD in the breathing tubes of their diving gear, perhaps. But eventually, even before she sees the mermaids for herself, she reverses her stance, comparing her change of heart to a political candidate's "flip-flop on abortion when the demographics called for it." She decides to believe Chip, reasoning that if the mermaids are real, "so much the better for us all," and if they're not, it's no personal threat to her. Millet suggests that belief might, in the end, be more arbitrary than we would like to think, simply the consequence of living with and loving the people we do. "Each country has its own hysterics," Chip likes to say, and while Deb and Chip are baffled by Middle America's creationists, people "suspicious of biology and mortally offended by an ape," the novel is not at all a simple indictment of faith. Rather, the mermaids, in their brief, magnetizing appearances, suggest the vitality of things beyond rational explanation. "I saw her face," Deb says, "I saw it full-on - not mythically beautiful, not mythically homely, just a face, its skin sickly white in the water. I saw gills on her neck, their slits opening. I saw a look of surprise." As much as the novel examines the dangers of belief, it also interrogates irony. When Deb is kidnapped, she texts Gina: "Locked in a room in our resort. Chip coming to save me (hope). Saw real mermaids. Even got video, but video stolen." Gina thinks it's a joke ("Her irony was far too bulletproof for a mermaid sighting; her irony was a Kevlar of the mind"). The only way for Deb to signal that she's serious is to text, "On the life of your mother," their agreed-upon message. When they were in high school, Gina's mother died of cancer, and the girls came up with the code to indicate when they were being "hard core," not joking. And suddenly, the novel shifts emotional registers: In the middle of wondering how (or if) Deb will escape, we're contemplating the role of irony as a shield that can distort emotions and facts, and at the same time, the pointedly unironic heart of this friendship. A HANDFUL OF small illustrations appear throughout the text. Like casual iPhone snapshots, they evoke blurry photographs - a look over Chip's shoulder at a computer screen, people watching a video of the mermaids - often with a thumb or a finger within the frame. The pictures are seductive, not as "evidence" so much as small staged fictions themselves. These images allude to social media and our penchant for documenting experience, but there's also something fantastical about them. Why believe an image more than anything else? Deb's own relationship with social media is conflicted. When it seems as if getting the word out about the mermaids might protect them against corporate greed, she's grateful for social networking and even agrees to tweet, "the lowest task of all," as she, Chip and their friends conspire to disseminate the video footage of the mermaids. But later, when the "roiling mass of opinion" churns in response, Middle Americans take to their computers to denounce the mermaids as "descendants of Lucifer," absurdly mixing science and religion. And it's clear the images of the mermaids have been read in a way Deb and her cohort did not at all intend. In her most original way, Millet dares us to examine how we ever know when to be "hard core," or when it's safe to let down our guard. It's a testament to her novel's power that these mermaids retain their mystery, and that the ending of "Mermaids in Paradise" is one of the most luminous and unsettling in recent fiction. RENÉ STEINKE'S most recent novel is "Friendswood." Her previous novel "Holy Skirts" was a National Book Award finalist. Groping for an explanation for the mermaids - LSD in the breathing tubes, perhaps.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. World-class worrier Deb is a quietly hilarious observer of and cautious participant in life, especially her life with new husband Chip, an uber-friendly gamer addicted to extreme sports. When the couple settle on a tropical island for a honeymoon, Deb reluctantly agrees to a scuba-diving adventure arranged by Chip and Nancy, a parrotfish expert Chip meets. A sighting of real mermaids, Nancy's wish to videotape them for scientific study, and the spiraling viral insanity of social media soon unleash all the hellhounds of today's polarized society. When corporate powers using militarized thugs plan to "theme park" the mermaids, Deb, Chip, and Nancy rally a crew of defenders, including an ex-Navy SEAL and a brilliant, gorgeous Tokyo videojournalist. Throw in a possible murder and a kidnapping and thus is born a wonderfully comedic, poignant thriller that will have you believing in the existence of mermaids. VERDICT Deb's endearing insecurity, unexamined courage, and unwavering love for her husband allow for a charming, albeit uncomfortable, examination of the power of skewed worldviews running off the rails, fueled by ignorance and fear, while smarter, cooler heads push back. Brilliant and wildly funny, with well-placed sharp jolts of sobering reality; Pulitzer Prize finalist Millet (Love in Infant Monkeys) is pure genius. [See Prepub Alert, 5/19/14.]-Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
