Mermaids
-
-
3.3 • 7 Ratings
-
-
- $7.99
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
"Mrs. Flax was happiest when she was leaving a place, but I wanted to stay put long enough to fall down crazy and hear the Word of God. I always called my mother Mrs. Flax." So begins this extraordinary first novel about one wild year in the life of fourteen-year-old Charlotte Flax, when she and her sister Kate move with Mrs. Flax into a sleepy 1960's Massachusetts town. Mrs. Flax is a woman who wears polka-dot dresses and serves hors d'oeuvres for dinner every night, and Kate is a child who basically wants to be a fish. And then there's Charlotte, who in Patty Dann's hands, is transformed into a young woman of infinite whim and variety. Charlotte's main ambition in life is to become a saint, preferably martyred, though she's Jewish. She's smitten with the shy young caretaker at the convent at the top of the hill. Dann has created a young girl who accepts the unkindness of the mad universe in which she's whirling and takes it on with a savage glee. Charlotte Flax is like no one you have ever met -- and someone you know very well.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There is a charm and freshness to this first novel, whose 14-year-old protagonist, Charlotte, speaks of her mother as Mrs. Flax and whose impulse toward martyrdom is enfeebled by erotic desire. Charlotte may censure her mother's bedroom generosity, but she is doubly severe with her own, flagellating her body and emulating the nuns in the convent near her house, one of 18 she's inhabited in her short life. Mrs. Flax, whose promiscuity extends to her surroundings, has driven Charlotte and her little sister Kate all over the country looking for a place that will not pall;this time, though, the children clamor to stay. Charlotte is determined to wait there until her unknown fatherwhose shoes she keeps on her shelf as a kind of sacramentpays the visit her mother is always forecasting. Six-year-old Kate, daughter of a frustrated Olympic swimmer who disappeared before her birth, spends most of her time in the pool or the bathtub, and wants to stay put until she feels like a "human bean'' again. Although both of their characters are sharply etched and recognizable, Kate and Charlotte make such strong demands upon the reader's affection that scenes in which only one of them appears seem incomplete.
