The Seas by Samantha Hunt
The narrator of The Seas is a mermaid. Or, she believes she is a mermaid. Or, she finds that being a mermaid is the only way to explain the cold, blue loneliness she feels coming-of-age in a town at the end of the world. Daughter of a man lost at sea and a woman “regularly torn between being herself and being my mother,” the narrator falls in love with Iraq War Veteran Jude, someone who is “not my father, but barely,” and attempts to escape the limits of her reality by articulating the truth of her own.
Like a siren, she leads readers into the depths of her consuming obsession with the men she loves and the words she finds inadequate to express it. Samantha Hunt’s novel pulled me in to a riptide and spit me back out during a 6-hour layover in the Dallas airport. I boarded my plane feeling like I’d finally gained my sea legs.