"In this dazzling, wrenching novel, Hunt challenges traditional mermaid mythology and constructs an unforgettable story about young womanhood in the process."
"One of the most distinctive and unforgettable voices I have read in years. This book will linger in your head for a good long time."
"Hunt's spare narrative is as mysterious and lyrical as a mermaid's song. The strands of her story are touched with magic, strange in the best possible way and very pleasurable to read."
"An aqueous affair, flooded with water themes . . . Hunt's writing is free of affectation and carries surprising conviction."
"Urgently real and magically unreal . . . A breathy, wonderful holler of a novel, deeply lodged in the ocean's merciless blue . . . [Hunt] sinks an anchor into the soul of its lost young protagonist."
"To describe Samantha Hunt's entrancing first novel, The Seas, is to try to interpret a watery dream that pushes the boundaries between fiction and fantasy. . . . Hunt's nimbleness makes the idea of leaning toward mermaid fantasies enticing."
"The Seas is creepy and poetic, subversive and strangely funny, [and] a phenomenal piece of literature."
"This modern feminist fairytale reels you in with its strangeness and beauty and gives voice to the dark realities of alcoholism, mental illness and the everyday messiness of life."
"Hunt blends myth and reality — if her father is from the sea, our narrator wonders, then isn't such magic in her blood as well? — and ends up with something truly stunning."
"An aqueous affair, flooded with water themes . . . Hunt's writing is free of affectation and carries surprising conviction."
A poetic, almost successful debut tale of a small-town girl who's in love-in about equal parts-with the sea, her absent father, and a man named Jude. That the narrator often seems younger than her 19 years may be due partly to the influence of the seedy, parochial, decrepit little seaside town where she lives-the town her father mysteriously disappeared from 11 years back, leaving wife and daughter to catch as catch can. "We don't move away," she tells us, " . . . because we are waiting for him to return." And the wait, it's hard for a reader to deny, feels long as the girl aches incessantly not only for her father but for the love of 33-year-old Jude, whom she met once when she was wading in the sea-and Jude was coming out of it, thus reminding her of her father, who may (not an absolute certainty) have disappeared into it. Jude and the girl become fast friends but not lovers-nor, however much she yearns for sex with him, do they become lovers later, in the novel's present time, after Jude has gone to and returned from the first Iraq war. After Iraq, he's different-inward, melancholy, "war-torn." And sexually unresponsive. And so things are frozen, halted. Only as Hunt turns farther toward a lyric magic realism where the real, symbolic, and imaginary blend, is it possible for the story's resolution to occur. The trouble is, though, that all hangs on Jude's war traumas, which have an inserted and prepackaged feel, and, further, don't provide change but only shock. Dream, madness, error, and sorrow, plus another strange and magical encounter, will at last bring everything to an end, if not a close. Intelligent, complex, and ambitious, with symbols and structure that have life and movement,while the psychology at the base of it all remains stubbornly-and unsatisfyingly-inert.
Hunt pours herself into the narrations . . . This haunting audiobook begs listeners to listen again.
"It’s hard to imagine that a book so brief could tackle the Iraq war, grief over the loss of a parent, the longing for freedom, an enthrallment with the ocean, loneliness, sexual awakening, faith, and etymology, all in less than 200 pages, but Samantha Hunt has done it, and done it well."
One of the most distinctive and unforgettable voices I have read in years. This book will linger . . . in your head for a good long time.” —Dave Eggers
“An aqueous affair, flooded with water themes . . . Hunt's writing is free of affectation and carries surprising conviction.” —The New Yorker
“Urgently real and magically unreal . . . A breathy, wonderful holler of a novel, deeply lodged in the ocean's merciless blue . . . [Hunt] sinks an anchor into the soul of its lost young protagonist.” —The Village Voice (2004 "Top Shelf" selection)
“The Seas reads as though . . . John Hawkes had sprouted Márquezian wings, Raymond Carver had lived to see Prozac proliferate. She has some of her tics, for sure—but they're palatable when tinged with the fabulous. . . . It's the book's emotional expressiveness . . . that ultimately breaks the mood's prescribed monotony and lofts it above its precursors.” —The New York Observer
“To describe Samantha Hunt's entrancing first novel, The Seas, is to try to interpret a watery dream that pushes the boundaries between fiction and fantasy. . . . Hunt's nimbleness makes the idea of leaning toward mermaid fantasies enticing.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Hunt's spare narrative is as mysterious and lyrical as a mermaid's song. The strands of her story are touched with magic, strange in the best possible way and very pleasurable to read.” —Andrea Barrett
