The Seas was an extraordinary novel by Samantha Hunt. It is told in the first person by a 19 year-old woman living in an unnamed small, northern seaside town with only one road leaving it (to the South, the road does not continue north). We are told the town has the highest rate of alcoholism in the country and it appears to be up there in suicide, accidental death, depression, insanity and cruelty as well.

The lyrical and spellbinding story is narrated by a 19 year-old girl (she does not seem anything like a woman) whose father drowned himself 11 years earlier and who thinks that he is still alive in the sea and that she is a mermaid. The novel is amazingly inventive with whimsical wordplay and imagination from beginning to end, telling the story of the girl's increasingly precipitous descent into her own world as she pursues a relationship with an emotionally damaged older man who returned from the war in Iraq.

Ultimately as much as one wants to believe that her father still loves her, that the older man knowingly sacrificed himself for her, that the blue lights following her car as it speeds along are the ocean and not the police, Hunt makes it nearly impossible and it is hard to escape the tragic conclusion that this is a sympathetic portrait of a wonderfully inventive but ultimately deeply depressing insanity, not a beautiful fantasy of a girl who is protected by her merman father who lives an enchanted life in otherwise dreary surroundings.

Samantha Hunt also wrote The Invention of Everything Else, a fictionalized account of the last days of Tesla as he befriends a chambermaid, which is also a window into madness and very highly recommended. Looking forward to more books by her.