I finished Samantha Hunt's The Seas very early yesterday morning, & it turned out to be really different from what i had kind of expected. I'd read her second novel first, & there's some similarities, but The Seas is a lot slimmer with more swearing & definitely darker overtones, to the point that some things actually did creep me out. It's told from the perspective of a teenage girl whose name you never learn and is convinced she's a mermaid. There's some of this blending of supernatural & reality in The Invention of Everything Else (which is Hunt's second novel), but not to the extent that is in The Seas. It's like you tend to take the narrator's side, but at the same time, you begin to question her sanity.

The ending is ambiguous; there's no definite, neat ending. The possibilty of what probably happens undercuts the small bits of happiness that show up by the end, the only ones in the whole story. The majority of the book is fairly bleak. But i've noticed how Hunt seems to have a knack for using words to emphasize themes of her books: water is (obviously) a major part of The Seas, & the words make it feel like there's water everywhere. And she does the same with the concept of flight in The Invention of Everything Else. It's really interesting.

Has anyone else read The Seas? What did you think of it?