#141 ~ Mermaids in the Basement

Mermaids in the Basement by Michael Lee West

Imagine finding evidence that your boyfriend, an up and coming movie director, was cheating on you with one of his starlets through a gossip magazine.  Imagine also that your mother Shelby and beloved step father just recently died in a plane crash, you’ve never had a good relationship with your recently engaged father Louie, and you’ve put on weight.  If you can, you are imagining yourself in the same place as Renata DeChavannes, the heroine of Mermaids in the Basement.  Her life seems to go to hell in a hand basket the moment she reads the gossip column.  She is a successful screenwriter in her own right, until she lets her emotions get in the way of her head.  When she finally decides to return to her hometown of Point Clear, Alabama, she finds her grandmother Honora and her friends ready, willing, and able to support her.  They also finally decide to fill in the details of her childhood.  With Can discovering the secrets surrounding her mother and Shelby’s relationship to Louie and his family give her the strength she needs to pick up the pieces?

Mermaids in the Basement had a distinctly Southern feel.  Honora, Isabella and Gladys are much what you would expect from lifelong Southern friends.  Honora is known for her wonderful parties, just as close family knows to avoid anything touched by Isabella beforehand.  I enjoyed these women and their interactions with each other.  They would be the type of women I would want to come home to when my world falls apart.  As much as I enjoyed hearing about the past in their voice, this became confusing when the chapter titles didn’t indicate who was speaking.  This wasn’t a huge hurdle, though.  What I found more difficult was the bruhaha that occurred at the engagement party that Honora threw for Louie and his latest fiance shortly after Renata arrived in Alabama.  Louie’s response fell flat for me.  Despite the rift between them, I found it difficult to believe that Louie would ever consider his daughter responsible or, if an accident occurred, to deny it outright.

Overall, I enjoyed reading about Renata and her misadventures.  The manner in which she loses her job had me laughing.  It’s so typical that a scorned woman to cut her nose off to spite her face when trying to fight back against the other woman.  Renata is someone with whom I would enjoy a friendship.  This novel, however, would have worked better for me if Shelby and Louie’s story had been told in real time instead of being told from multiple points of view.  I never really found much of the secrets surrounding Renata’s childhood all that compelling.  Despite the family history, Renata was never that delicate a flower that she couldn’t have found out about those things.  Perhaps if the only secret had been about why her father was absent would have sufficed.  Then, the novel could have been more fully about a father and his daughter.  As much as I loved Honora and Gladys especially, Renata and Louie’s relationship was the most solid part of the book.  I found myself wanting more interaction between them and less of the slowly revealed family history.

***********

Curious about this novel?

Here is a link to the Reader’s Guide provided on the author’s website.

To buy this novel, click here.