| Title | : | Mermaids in Paradise |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0393351726 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780393351729 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 |
| Publication | : | First published October 27, 2014 |
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.
Mermaids in Paradise Reviews
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This book started out as a three-star book. It was humorous, and the writing style was witty and engaging. I liked main character Deb's observations on weddings, mud runs and the like.
The mermaids pushed it firmly into two-star territory. The introduction of the fantastical element was abrupt, rather jarring, and not entirely well handled. Main character Deb started getting a bit preachy, a bit less likeable. But the book still had legs - it could still go.
The ending is what made this a one-star book. What. The. Fuck. What a cheap, utterly worthless way to end a book. If I tried that shit in my sophomore creative writing class in college, my professor would have flunked me after laughing in my face. And I would have deserved it. Not cool, Lydia. I would have thrown this book across the room if I hadn't been listening to it on my phone.
Read instead:
The works of Carl Hiassen
Big Trouble and Tricky Business by Dave Barry -
A very delightful book! Didn't go in the direction I thought it would, initially, but boy did I love the ride just the same. This definitely is genre-bending - it starts out as a kind of beach read/chick lit to introduce the main characters, then goes to a fantasy adventure, and the to almost an underdog heist. The tone very much reminded me of Libba Bray's Beauty Queen - just enough absurdity in a tropical location to keep you on your toes. Deb's husband Chip is a total babe in that nerdy way so many of us like. Her BFF Gina is the best kind of snarky. It even has a Quint from Jaws kind of character! So much to enjoy and giggle about here. Highly entertaining, fairly quick read, not as much mermaid material as I was expecting, but the story kept me interested the whole way.
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2.5 Stars for Mermaids in Paradise (audiobook) by Lydia Millet read by Cassandra Campbell.
I’m not sure how this got on my TBR. I definitely didn’t look at the reviews when I decided that it looked interesting. Oddly enough between checking the book out from the digital library and starting to listen to the story, I heard about a real life sighting of a merman on Joe Rogan’s podcast. I think Joe’s guest said that he was in South Africa when he had his sighting. So I was actually looking forward to this book when I started it. And the premise to the story was similar to the sighting that I had heard about on the podcast. But the story just didn’t work. It felt like it needed another rewrite or two. It kind of felt like the Scooby-Doo-like detectives spent most of the time complaining about climate change instead of helping the mermaids🧜♀️. In the end the mermaids didn’t need the kids’ help. -
This book was chock-full of issues for me.In the opening section, describing the lead-up to the wedding seemed irrelevant and unnecessary. The mud run and bachelorette party never paid off, and it felt as if the author had experienced these things in her own life and felt the need to talk about them in a book as a platform for her "witty" commentary.
Once we got to the honeymoon, I found Deb to be a very unreliable narrator. She made blanket statements about other characters who she barely knew or spent any time with (Nancy wasn't a big hugger, Nancy always had her inhaler)that seemed like convenient facts to push the story along without having any merit. It is a huge pet peeve for an author to tell me how a character acts/behaves instead of showing me how they act or behave. She constantly mentions how ironic her friend Gina is, but when we finally get to spend some time with Gina later on in the book, there's no shred of irony.
The term "in my mind's eye" drives me nuts. It's writerly, cringe-worthy, and Millet uses it twice. It bothered me enough to count.
This book proves the "can't judge a book by its cover" idiom. Cool cover, lousy read. -
What the hell with these other reviews? This is a good book. Funny, interesting, and delightfully strange.
-
A couple on honeymoon at a Caribbean resort get roped into helping a marine biologist when she discovers mermaids in the coral reefs, setting off a comedic chain of events – not least of which is the apparent death of the biologist by drowning in her bathtub. I am unsure if I was supposed to find this funny or not, which is an indication of the problematic tone of this novel.
It is billed as a satire, and I was sort of expecting something along the lines of Carl Hiaasen. However, the book is way too frothy and loses its buoyancy when it segues into a rather fumbling ‘whodunnit’.
Surprisingly, the titular mermaids only make their appearance quite late, with the first section dissecting the life of the newlyweds. By then it is quite apparent that the mermaids are just a McGuffin, with Millet giving short shrift to any serious consideration of such a potential discovery.
The ‘whodunnit’ section is totally implausible, with a lot of bad plotting and even worse characterisation. Also, Millet attempts to be mock serious at this point, which simply does not work. I also found the lead female character to be extremely fatuous and irritating; her Labrador-like ‘jock’ husband is equally annoying.
The scene where she accidentally plays footsie with a hick from the American Heartland at the dinner table, and then feels guilty when he presumes her attention was that of a fellow foot fetishist – it cannot be cheating if it is foot-genital contact, says the hick, apparently borrowing a cigar from Bill Clinton – is enough to set the feminist movement back a couple of centuries.
Of course, our heroine then spends the entire fucking book worrying about whether or not she actually is a foot fetishist, by which stage the long-suffering reader just wants to kick her in the face and throw her to the mermaids as fish bait.
There is quite an awe-inducing moment towards the end when Millet pulls a Peter Jackson ‘more is bigger and better’ move on the mermaids ... but then she ruins the effect totally by having our heroine ruminate on an impending asteroid strike on the planet. WTF?
Thus the book limps towards its watery conclusion. Satire is one of the most difficult things to write, as it requires a fine balance between incredulity and believability. It does not mean that commonsense and logic can be thrown out of the window. Millet tries to set the bar higher than a light and undemanding beach read, but scuppers her own best intentions. -
Great premise (a California couple on their honeymoon in the British Virgin Islands unexpectedly get firsthand proof of mermaids while diving in a coral reef), but an ultimately unsatisfying satire. The characters are straight out of central casting. Narrator Deb’s sarcastic voice is entertaining to start with but quickly becomes clichéd and catty about obese Midwesterners.
Millet clearly has a strong environmental conscience (Save the mermaids and coral reefs!), but any potential message is diluted by the disappointing plot. The novel is both too short and too thin, like Millet couldn’t be bothered to fill in details (e.g. “Long story short, we achieved the shore without anything surprising happening”), and the deus ex machina ending renders meaningless everything that’s gone before.
I’ve heard good things about Millet, but I’d need to read up a bit more about her work and ideally get a personal recommendation before trying another of her books. -
This book is imperfect, but imperfect in utterly fascinating ways. Millet, more than any other author I've come across, is willing to face up to the dilemmas of writing satire within the tradition of realism (or, perhaps, realism in the tradition of satire). As in any satire, some scenes in this book exist only to make an intellectual point, and for laughs. For instance: Deb and Chip stand in for any contemporary, socially consciousness young couple, and Millet could set them up as such in any way she liked. She chose the wedding industry and tough-guy mud running, because those things are deeply harmful to, you know, civilization as a whole, and need to be mocked. She mocks them. The mockery is enjoyable. Deb's friend Gina is an ironic academic for no particularly good reason, except that ironic academics (including myself) deserve mockery. And so it goes. There are mermaids because that gives Millet a way to write about, inter alia, feminism, environmental destruction, capitalism, and tourism, all things she has dealt with in her previous three novels to great effect. Only this is much funnier.
The problem is that this intellectual, humorous approach clashes rather badly with mainstream literary realism. By the end of the book, it seems that we should really be caring for these characters. Poor Gina is only ironic because her mother died young. Chip might mud-run and play video games, but he's a good guy. Deb might be sarcastic, but she's smart and compassionate. Etc...
As many of the negative reviews here unintentionally point out, that's a very difficult problem, and Millet hasn't solved it. The negative reviews all complain that the characters aren't sufficiently likable (well, it's a satire, so...); or the narrator is unreliable (it's the first person, and Deb is giving her opinion...); or the mermaids come out of nowhere (again, it's a satire, not a love story). I was tempted to write a negative review in which I complain about the characters being too realistic, the mermaids being insufficiently bizarre, and so on, but really, what's fascinating is the craft problem of the book. Can anyone combine these two ways of writing? I hope Millet keeps trying.
****
[Spoiler alert]:
Now, in other news, the ending of this book is fairly ridiculous, and a really good example of how to fail at combining the intellectual/humorous/satirical and the emotional/moving/realistic strands. As you may know, Millet ends the book by kind of mentioning, by the by, that the world is about to end. As an intellectual point, it's not bad: these people have been fighting over some mermaids (will they be commercially exploited, or will they be allowed to live in peace under the watchful gaze of big science?), even though in a very short period of time an asteroid would swing by and obliterate the planet. I.e., your petty squabbles about, say, abortion, pale in significance compared to the actually existing problem of environmental destruction.
This is very nicely done as an intellectual point: lest you somehow missed the point that the mermaids were not mermaids, but a deep ecological symbol for nature as a whole, the asteroid should make it pretty obvious (an asteroid strike we could have avoided, by the way, if we'd only worked together). All these people's activities--marriage, mud-racing, mermaid rescuing--stand in for our daily activities--marriage, mud-racing, reading Lydia Millet books. We're wasting time, and the asteroid/climate change approacheth.
It is not, however, aesthetically pleasing. In fact, it's downright silly, coming as it does in the last two pages of the book. How Deb, who is quite garrulous, could have failed to mention the forthcoming end of the world is not clear to me. Also not clear to me is why Millet, a fabulous craftsperson, could have failed to incorporate this more smoothly. I hope that it's just setting up a sequel, but I fear it's just one more fascinating, failed experiment in bringing together mind and heart. -
blargh! i was really hoping for some smart fun with this read. it just didn't work for me. while i feel like millet is a clever, interesting person (i mean, this is a cool concept for a novel) it felt like this book was trying too hard to be edgy, or irreverent. instead of being absorbed in the story, i was feeling as though i was reading the effort to be edgy. it was awkward. one character is all about being ironic. the problem here, though, is we are hit in the face with it so many time. in the novel, the word 'irony' is used 16 times; the word 'ironic' 18 times. after a certain point, this just became a distraction - though perhaps it could become a new drinking game? (trying to 'on the upside' it here. heh.) 'mermaids in paradise' reminded me a lot of
Carl Hiaasen - i enjoy his books very much; more than i did this one. sorry!! -
This novel began so well. The protagonist, Deb, is stunningly funny. Deb’s
Insights into her relationship with her fiancé, Chip, are hysterically funny. And then there’s the honeymoon, where, well, as the title implies, there are Mermaid sightings. This is a work of fiction, and I guess I’m a fan of more realistic fiction. It’s a silly romp of a story. Millet writes well, and Deb maintains her interesting musings. That’s what kept me interested in the novel. -
Too much self-obsessed narrator, too little mermaid.
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Deb and Chip are newly married and about to venture to the British Virgin Islands for a well-researched honeymoon. While there, they spot mermaids, experience a kidnapping, and organize a rescue party for said mermaids. Humor is constant throughout. Similar to Carl Hiassen who writes with humor and environmental passion.
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Hmm.
I've never started a book recommendation with “Hmm” before, but this book was such a headscratcher, that's the first word (monosyllable?) that comes to mind.
Caustic narrator Deb and her new husband Chip are on their honeymoon in the British Virgin Islands. (That makes Mermaids in Paradise the second book I've read this month set in the V.I., but it couldn't be more different from the first,
Land of Love and Drowning.) They're from California and very proud of it. Deb spends most of her time mentally criticizing everyone she encounters. Her narration is funny at times, but in a super snarky, can't-believe-you'd-admit-to-that way. Especially in the first half of the book, the tone reminded me of Herman Koch's
The Dinner—humorous, but only if you can access a really dark place. Chicken Soup for the Soul, this ain't. (Are those books still in print? Is someone still milking that cash cow?)
Chip, garrulous and friendly (much to Deb's chagrin), makes friends with other guests at the resort in no time, and soon a marine biologist named Nancy confides that she's discovered mermaids swimming around the reef nearby. Events take a turn for the surreal when Nancy's wild claim proves true. What follows is an impassioned battle with the establishment to protect the mermaids and their habitat from exploitation.
Deb is one literary character I'd least like to meet in real life, but I admit to smirking now and then as she mercilessly skewered Midwesterners. I love living in the land of wheat and high winds, and would probably end up walking into a river a la Virginia Woolf if forced to live in a densely populated coastal city, but frankly, there are a lot of religious nuts out this way. And they show up to vote, which causes all kinds of havoc.
The headscratch-y part of the book occurs in the last couple of pages,
Thus, “Hmm.” Still, I think I liked Mermaids in Paradise. Despite its problems, it made for addictive reading. These days, if a book can both make me think and make me laugh, I call it a win.
More book recommendations by me at
www.readingwithhippos.com -
General Thoughts
Lydia Millet is a new author to me this year and has quickly become one of my favorites. I had my qualms going into this book given the low average rating, but in the end I adored it. You have to know going into it that it is satire (seems like that's what a lot of the reviewers didn't quite get), and I thought it was a brilliant satire on our current condition. It touched my heart on many levels.
Ratings (1 to 5)
Writing: 5
Plot: 5
Characters: 4
Emotional impact: 5
Overall rating: 4.75
Favorite Quotes
"It's not that I don't like people overall; I just like to personally select the ones I spend time with. I favor screening techniques that don't involve random proximity."
"It seemed to me the virtual world was even worse than the real one, when it came to humanity. To look at screens like these, you'd think there was nothing left of us but a pile of pixilated ash. We were a roiling mass of opinion, and what were those opinions? Small-minded and vicious. That was what had been distilled of our civilization. Here we sat at the technological peak, and what we chose to do at that shining pinnacle was hate each other's guts."
"Here come my people, those teeming hordes, here come my people, brandishing their stupidity. Above their heads they raise stupidity like a flaming sword."
"...it had taken our ancestors four million years to figure out fire. It took them five million years to to develop writing. And then, in a great acceleration -- just a brief, screaming handful of seasons -- we got electricity, nukes, commercial air travel, trips to the moon. Overnight the white sands of the parrotfish were running out. Here went the poles, melting, and here, at last, went paradise."
"He knew we'd done it to ourselves, made our own village into idiots. We'd put our best-looking idiots on thrones, those empty pawns and shiny dolls. And then we had the balls to act surprised -- even superior! --when people began to worship them."
"I liked him too. I liked so many people , when I got to know them, and when I was drinking." -
What an utter disappointment. What a terrible twist at the end. What a waste of time. I've read all her books. This was just lacking. I cannot believe she was able to get away with that ending. Does anyone edit anymore?
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Always on the lookout for humorous books, I was pleased to receive an electronic ARC for what was purported to be a hilarious new novel by well-regarded author, Lydia Millet. Loosely, the story is about newlyweds honeymooning in the Virgin Islands when genuine mermaids are discovered swimming in the coral reefs. Things quickly get out of hand with a cast of zany characters and situations (alleged murder, kidnappings, commercialism of the resort and its new found tourist attraction, etc.) however, by book’s end, order is restored.
I really wanted to like this one but I was disappointed by Millet’s use of snarky narrator Deb, insufferably mean-spirited, self-involved and snobbish, to relate the incidents. In the book’s opening section, too much time is spent describing the couple and their relationship (at least Chip is way more pleasant than Deb) and it takes too long getting to the discovery of the mermaids. Deb redeems herself a bit toward the end, but her nastiness at the beginning of the book was so overwhelming (see her riff on middle America, obesity, and religious hysteria), she and her friend Gina offended rather than charmed me. Clearly the book is meant as a satire, think Where’d You Go, Bernadette, but the stereotypical characters are not nearly as likeable or memorable. There were amusing moments and the novel’s themes had merit (which is why I gave this one 3 stars) but overall the book was uneven, strangely paced, and should have been much funnier. -
“This delightful book starts out as almost chick-lit, turns into a fantasy adventure, then leads into an underdog heist. The tone reminds me of Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens, with just enough absurdity in a tropical location to keep you on your toes. Protagonist Deb’s husband, Chip, is a total babe (in a nerdy way) and her BFF, Gina, is the best kind of snarky. A highly entertaining read!”
Amanda Monson, Bartow County Library System, Cartersville, GA -
There are just a few writers who manage to strike a balance between humor and sincerity with such a clear eye on the overwhelming challenges, both personal and ecological, of our times. (Monica Drake is really the only other one who comes to mind.) This book, set in the British Virgin Islands during a honeymoon, comes on lightweight, fluffy, and funny but will leave you reeling with its devastating final pages. Highly recommended.
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3.5 stars
Deb and Chip get married and then head to the Caribbean for their honeymoon. Instead of the relaxing splurge in resort amenities, they find themselves in the midst of the discovery of a mermaid colony. Social media and corporations take the discovery as a way to turn a profit and conservationists see the mermaids and their habitat instantly put in danger. Characters are kidnapped and worse.
I really enjoyed the lead up to the mermaid story. Millet's style of funny asides and crazy views about the Heartland cracked me up and I was reading silly quotes aloud to my partner. She has a brilliant mind and forces her readers to take a good, hard look at their beliefs.
But the middle of this novel dragged for me. There seemed to be a lot of waiting around for others to show up. I felt there too many characters to keep track of and many of them had a role of no importance. The ending was satisfying - too much so - as everything was tidily resolved with no lingering a-ha. -
As much as I love Goodreads, I rarely look at ratings for a book before I read it. I usually read reviews after I've already read the book because I don't like having other people's opinions in my head while I'm reading a book. In this case, I wish that I looked at the rating before listening to this on OverDrive. It has a rating of less than 3.0. That is rare on Goodreads and now that I've finished the book, I can understand why.
The book is about a couple (mid-to-late twenties I think) getting married, going on their honeymoon to the British Virgin Isles and then adventure ensues when they encounter mermaids. Yes, mermaids. I was very intrigued by this plot because it's not something I encounter in books on a regular basis. So much potential.
The first few chapters were actually pretty good. The book starts off with the engaged couple, Deb and Chip, thinking about their bachelor/ette parties and other pre-wedding things. Millet inserts some interesting insights to the wedding industry that were witty and fun to read about.
The book really loses its legs when Deb and Chip embark on their honeymoon, which is about 80% of the novel. Millet uses the same tone throughout the book of Deb having 'witty' insights that quickly lose their wit and become obnoxious. Millet's witticism in this book is like that one person at a party who tells a joke that people laugh at and compliment the joke-teller on how clever it was. The joke-teller then keeps repeating it ad-nauseum until you want to punch him/her in the face. You try to get away from the joke-teller but he/she keeps appearing with the same stupid joke.
The characters get themselves into trouble and some of it is pretty serious - i.e. with national and international authorities. They have guns pointed in their faces. Some people get abducted. Serious shit happens. What is Deb's insight to these things? oh em gee, I'm wearing a muumuu, I'm gonna be the woman in pictures wearing a muumuu. oh em gee, that lady has eyebrows like caterpillars. It's like the author is trying to be funny and witty at the same time but the wit that she inserts into the book at the most inappropriate time ends up being shallow and devoid of any meaningful insight.
Reading this book felt like I was indulging the author's vanity project where she pats herself on the back for being so clever and cute, never mind that it comes across as absolute drivel. The book is advertised as a satire and the point gets whacked across your head throughout the book. It ended up feeling very gimmicky with very little substance.
If you're interested in reading this book, read only the first part prior to the honeymoon and pretend it's a short story. Trust me, it's all downhill from there. By downhill, I mean it PLUMMETS. -
I made it partway through the third CD and returned this one to Overdrive. It's just not the book for me at this time. Deb is more grating than my nerves can handle right now. Things that are supposed to be funny are falling flat. I'm just in the wrong mood for ridiculous, over-the-top, privileged, entitled California people having adventures and epiphanies.
Maybe I'll try again another time. -
this book has MERMAIDS in it!
-
Sometimes fun is what I want in a book. This medium length novel was complete fun all the way through. It was the September pick of my 2018 challenge to read one book a month from the TBR lists I compile each year. If you have followed my reviews for a while you know that I have loved all four previous novels I have read by Lydia Millet. Mermaids in Paradise was no exception.
The story is hilarious, endearing and satirical, all in one. Deb and Chip have navigated through their families' input on their wedding day. Deb is an opinionated though clear thinking modern woman while Chip is easy going. They are a perfect balance for each other.
Soon enough they are on their honeymoon at a Caribbean island resort complete with a high-end restaurant that serves meals on a platform over the water. Chip meets other guests in his friendly outgoing way, one of whom is a marine biologist. Nancy is there to study the health of the coral reefs in our current toxic oceans. While doing so she encounters what appear to be actual mermaids.
Word gets out and the parent company of the resort swoops in to capture the mermaids in an initial step to develop a theme park featuring those mythical creatures. You practically get whip lash from the speed at which an idyllic honeymoon turns into something of an eco thriller.
However, Lydia Millet's writing through the voice of Deb, who narrates the story, keeps it light and breezy. Considering there are mermaids involved, Lydia and Deb also keep it real.
I must admit I was not enticed by the cover or even the title. Truly I had very little idea what I was getting into but I sure am glad I did! Next time you visit the Caribbean be sure to take this novel with you. -
This is an interestingly awful book. I feel like this book was a sort of writing exercise for Millet - an effort to emulate Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard - to produce some sort of wacky crime fiction. That has got to be the case because Millet was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and this book is so nutso-bad.
The book is narrated by Deb who is a self-absorbed, hyper-judgmental woman in her twenties. She is about to get married to Chip. What is noteworthy about Chip is that he has no faults, which is an interesting choice on Millet's part. Pair a miserable human being with a saint, and then expect the reader to root for the non-saint. Hmmmmm. Anyway, the book drags on through the pre-wedding festivities and the wedding itself, longer than it should IMHO, and it finally starts to pick up when Chip and Deb reach their honeymoon destination - Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands - and discover mermaids. That is where the Hiaasen/Leonard hijinks begin. There are wacky characters galore, a death/murder, a kidnapping (or two), villainy, high speed vehicle drama, and much drinking. There are serious environmental points made (Hiaasen) and wicked people in charge who need a comeuppance (Leonard). However, filtered through Deb's voice, these events are just annoying.
I suppose that Deb does become a better person by the end of the book, but by then, I just did not care.
Finally, and here is SPOILER ALERT...…………………………………………………………………………………………….
Millet does something in the last paragraph of the book which is amazingly annoying...….. Everything has been wrapped up, and the newlyweds have decided to leave the BVI for St. Johns to finish their co-opted honeymoon, and Deb explains to the reader that the world will be ending in a couple of weeks anyway due to a giant asteroid that is headed for the earth - SAY WHAT?!!! How annoying is that? First of all, no one so far in the book has been acting like the world will be ending - not in little ways or in big ways - you would think that if the world was ending, people who serve drinks to tourists at resorts might decide to quit and spend the last days with family and friends rather than wiping up cocktail lounge tables and scrambling for tips OR that the resort conglomerate would see no point in building an attraction based on attracting tourists to their resort to see the mermaids. So basically Millet just decided to throw this in to screw with the reader because there has been exactly zero-foreshadowing and so it makes zero sense. This little "gotcha" thrown in by Millet made me feel like she was really saying "F*#k You reader - I have no respect for you at all." -
I wanted to like this book so much, it has real live Mermaids in it, right? And who doesn't like Mermaids? Since I have never encountered a real life Mermaid, I thought this will be fun to read all about them - who are they, what do they do, do they eat? Have sex? Swim all day? Just what ... Anyway, I digress - I must say this is perhaps one of the very worst books I have read in the last four years. I read about four books a month, mostly fiction, a lot of bios and auto bios, some non-fiction and I have read quite a lot of good stuff the last year. But this book is so confounding, I just don't know what to say.
I will save you all the details of plot and story, as everyone else has seemed to sum it all up very well. Yes, our narrator is very snarky and seems to hate Middle Americans, obesity, etc, and her cute husband is like a big puppy dog, making friends wherever he goes. But what really got me is, that almost the whole entire middle section of the book is one big gigantic BORE! The author keeps repeating herself over and over and you feel that you will never get anywhere in this book. Boring - meaning, the gang of people she introduces just sit and talk, and look at their computers, then they drink a lot, then they get on a boat, they get off of a boat, one disappears, one is kidnapped, maybe I am saying too much? But it goes round and round and nothing really happens, or perhaps it just takes too darn long for anything to happen.
Suffice it to say, it is not a good book, not very interesting - yes, there ARE Mermaids who are introduced half way through, they last about a half a page and then are gone, only to return towards the end, a very silly ending and resolution - and once again - they are gone.
Boring, I recommend DO NOT read. -
I'm an ardent Millet fan, but this one didn't quite work for me. She often starts with a familiar premise--an unexpected inheritance, the discovery of adultery--then turns it into something wholly new and, often, mysteriously beautiful. But here the slapstick beginning,a honeymoon gone wrong,while often hilarious and spot-on in its satire, doesn't deepen until the last pages. For too long it meanders, a belabored mash-up of screwball comedy and thriller. Hard to believe, but Millet gets boring in the novel’s middle sections! Maybe I'm getting old and crotchety, but the main character Deb's mordant fascination with Middle Americans (particularly fat ones) rubbed me the wrong way.
Only a fool would write Millet off completely, though. Near the end, the novel swings back into her usual magnificence, as reverence for the natural world and terror for the future pilot the story from shallow waters into the profound and moving deep. The language regains its inventive, incisive verve, and what is at stake, for Deb and for our planet, becomes all too achingly clear. -
Millet gives us some clever lines and observations from her colorful characters and certainly has a saucy attitude, by turns serious and absurd, biting and silly. It really kind of bounces around, leaving one a bit seasick.
The story sort of sputters out towards the end. Characters just kind of pile up and lose their distinctiveness as the story becomes a more heavy handed environmental message. There's a convenient "out of nowhere" solution to the dilemma of the mermaids… and another out of nowhere ending for the book. An asteroid? Really? -
The author's attempt to satirize the chick-lit mystery genre emulating the style of Carl Hiassen in his environmental mystery satires is an utter failure. The story has very few moments of humor, the characters are cardboard stereotypes and the plot is pedestrian. It takes a long time to get into the story and many of the elements appear to be recycled from other mysteries. The ending is what one would expect, and yet, it somehow seems to come out of left field because it is not well-connected to the rest of the story.
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OK, I love Lydia Millet but if you haven't read her, this is not where you start. This is a little wacky even for her, and I do think there was some pacing issues. I did get a decent amount of laughs from this satire though, and the ending is sure to result in a HUGE reaction by the reader--I thought it worked absolutely perfectly. This book is six years old, it is absolutely perfect for 2020 though.
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Sometimes I am honestly stumped by a book. DO I give it one star or five? Did I love it or hate it? Mermaids in Paradise was a conundrum for me.
So I'll start with what I loved: Deb, our narrator. The narrative is presented in a slight train-of-thought style: not overly postmodern, but just sprinkled with her observations and trailing thoughts. She is clever, snarky, and deliciously human. The first third of the book is really just setting up the characters, since it is Deb narrating the wedding and bachelor/bachelorette parties. And I LOVED it. I'd read a whole book that is just Deb narrating her day-to-day life. Which is funny, because she has many opinions very much against my own beliefs, but Lydia Millet makes her so loveable you really just want her to narrate your whole life. Ah, Deb. You're the best.
Then we get to the plot: on her honeymoon, they discover mermaids! And of course bad people want to exploit the mermaids and the good guys want to save them. This is where I got... well, bored. Funnily enough, once the plot kicks in and we get more "this is what's happening" and less "Deb ranting about life" I found my interest waning. I think there was too much plot, which I am pretty sure I've never said before. Deb was not the narrator you want for a book like this because at times it's just too serious for her voice to shine, and at times we get infodumps that don't suit the narration style. I did like that the mermaids remained a background presence, and we only see them a few times.
Then... oh then, we get to a huge reveal that is literally on the last page of the book.
So basically I am really conflicted because I loved Deb so much but disliked everything else. I'd like to read more from this author and see if there are books with a better balance of character/narration and plot.
