Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness
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Books may be Mayumi Saito's greatest love and her one source of true pleasure. Forty-one years old, disenchanted wife, and dutiful mother, Mayumi's work as a librarian on a small island off the coast of New England feeds her passion for reading and provides her with many occasions for wry observations on human nature, but it does little to remedy the mundanity of her days. That is, until the day she issues a library card to a shy seventeen-year-old boy and swiftly succumbs to a sexual obsession that subverts the way she sees the library, her family, the island she lives on, and ultimately herself.
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Jennifer Tseng is wonderful writer with an incredible ability to manipulate the english language. Tragically, this is a terrible novel with an idiodic plot, weak dialogue and a narrator that I would smash in the face with a shovel were she a real person.
Mayumi is a middle-aged woman with virtually no friends, a young daughter who she spoils pointlessly (she's still breastfeeding at the age of four), and an endless well of rationalization for cheating on her husband with a 17-year old boy. This would be tolerable if there was any character development but there isn't; she's the same self-involved, delusional waste of space throughout. And the supporting characters have no depth, not even the teenager she beds or his mother. The only slightly redeeming factor was the island setting, which was fully fleshed and beautifully described. Not nearly enough to justify the existence of 281 pages of purple prose.
I recieved this book through a firstreads giveaway, so thank you to Penguin Books.
