The Mermaid Garden

Locations
Call Number: Fiction
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"A Touchstone book."
Ten-year-old Floriana is captivated by the beauty of the magnificent Tuscan villa that overlooks the sea just outside her small village. She likes to spy from the crumbling wall into the gardens and imagine that one day she'll escape her meager existence and live there surrounded by its other worldly splendor. Then one day Dante, the son of the villa's powerful industrialist owner, invites her inside and shows her the enchanting Mermaid Garden. From that moment, Floriana knows that the only destiny for her is there, in that garden, with Dante. But as they grow up and fall in love, their romance causes a crisis, jeopardizing the very thing they hold most dear. Decades later and hundreds of miles away, a beautiful old country house hotel on England's Devon coast has fallen on hard times after the financial crash of 2008. Its owner, Marina, advertises for an artist to stay the summer and teach the guests how to paint. The man she hires is charismatic and wise and soon begins to pacify the discord in her family and transform the fortunes of the hotel. However, he has his own agenda. Is it to destroy, to seduce, or to heal? Whatever his intentions, he is certain to change Marina's life forever.--From inside front jacket cover.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Cute if annoying... submitted by carr1_e on July 24, 2011, 7:38am This book was cute. The writing style was nice, but the plot devices were very frustrating. The book contains two stories: One takes place in Italy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and one takes place in England in the present day.

"Chick lit" at its finest submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on August 14, 2013, 8:21pm Here's the trick for me in rating this book at the moment: this novel is totally and completely "chick lit," and that's just not what I'm into at the moment. So for that reason, it didn't entirely appeal to me. But my sister practically glowed when she talked about it, and I've long said that I'll read pretty much anything that someone tells me is outstanding.

I've got to say, within its genre, this rocks.

Which made me thing about the genre. What makes "chick lit" BE "chick lit"? Here's what I came up with: the WHOLE thing is about relationships. If you took out the relationships, there is essentially no story left. That's not a bad thing, it's just a defining thing. And those relationships don't have to be romances, although there is often at least one budding romantic element in these books. But there are also friendships, parent/child relationships, longstanding hatreds, established marriages, and more.

This novel hits them all, and I have to say, it does it beautifully. It also tells the story using the fairly common device of telling what appear to be two different stories from two different times in history, and only far into the book do you figure out how the two pieces come together. Again, it was done beautifully.

So if chick lit is your thing, or you are looking for a lighter read, or you know someone who does like this genre, this was a great one. My sister was right. (Even if it's not mostly what I'm into these days.)