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Sea Hearts 9781742375052 Books

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Sea Hearts 9781742375052 Books

Bought on the strength of a Canberra Times review, this collection of tales about the 'sea wives' of Rollrock Island was completely mesmerising! Based on the legends of Selkies, women who emerge from seals' bodies, marry land-dwelling men, then return to the sea, if their seal skins are not hidden from them.
This story is written in seven parts, each dealing almost chronologically with the story of how the witch, Misskaella, learns how to draw women out of the seals that flock around this northern sea island. The seal-wives are beautiful, tall, slim, with long dark hair. No comparison with the Rollrock women, who are red-haired, freckled, and bow-legged.
Eventually all the Rollrock men take a seal-wife, and then all the non-seal-wives leave Rollrock for the mainland!
Daughters of these marriages have to be returned to the sea, to provide more seal-wives presumably.
The sons worry about their 'mams' who are pining for their ocean life, and a plan is devised to set them free. However, the wives know a way to take their boys too..
Poignant and very touching, Lanagan's story brings the legend to life. I didn't want it to end!


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Sea Hearts 9781742375052 Books Reviews

I have been captivated by Margo Lanagan's skill as a writer since I read her short story Singing My Sister Down. I don't recall any other short story evoking such emotion before or since.

I discovered Tender Morsels last year and that was another powerful display of skill, this time in novel form.

Sea Hearts continues this showcasing of her skill, with language and narrative. Reading Lanagan is like watching the world through aged glass. The world and its characters are identifiable but there is a ripple, a distortion that separates us.

It's in this distortion that Margo plays, drawing on folklore and legends, weaving them with the mundane, creating modern day folktales, presenting us with scenarios but passing no judgement.

She's often pigeon-holed as a YA writer ( no doubt in part due to her very early works) but she's had more than a toe dipped in the speculative fiction community for some time now. I tend to view her work as mature fiction, with depth and power. I would certainly recommend her to any intelligent reader 14 years and up.

An example of the depth of the novel is the multitude of angles that you can approach Sea Hearts from. It's a clever weaving of the legend of the Selkie into a moving narrative; it's a comment on relationships between men and women, mothers and sons, the value of women, love, bullying, justice and revenge.

In simple plot terms, it's the story of the Witch Misskaella who summons seal women from the sea to partner the men of the island and the ramifications of this action. The story is told from the perspective of various people, from different generations, who are connected to the consequences or the Island in some fashion.

One of the highlights is Lanagan's talent in shaping the English language to her own ends. She's joyously crude in some instances;

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She snorted and matter flew out of one of her nostrils and into the blanket. She knitted on savagely. The bone's rustling in the weed sent my boy-sacks up inside me like startled mice into their hole.

Daniel Mallet on meeting the witch Misskaella
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and powerfully understated in others.
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Ean, Froman, Hugh. Where do I begin with the questions I cannot ask her?....'But whose?' I say. `Whose are you? What man of this isle got you on our Miss?'

Trudle Callisher on discovering Misskaella had been a mother.
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Whereas the folktale often presents black and white characters - the handsome prince, the evil witch; Lanagan gives us a villain( if one can call her that), who is both a victim of a community and her own actions. Misskaella's actions cause others grief, pain and loss, but there is a sense that her actions if not justified, are human and understandable.

I was storm tossed by this novel, sympathising with Misskaella in one chapter, finding myself disgusted with her the next. Whether a story is a comedy or a tragedy often depends on where you stop the telling. We finish on a happy note with Sea Hearts but the reader has had to sail through a storm of sorrows to get there.

Sea Hearts will captivate and manipulate you. It will raise questions for you. When you emerge from Lanagan's spell you won't quite be the same.

This book was a review copy provided by Allen & Unwin
Sea Hearts (terrible name!) was probably the best book I read last year. A complete surprise.

The story is great and the language is simple but fresh - maybe the author is a poet?

You must read it.
I read "Tender Morsels" some years ago and loved the writing, but thought the story lost momentum and descended into silliness as it progressed. Not so with this tale of the nature of love, marriage and loneliness. It is of a piece, with a beginning middle and end all tied up in a cohesive bow. The language is beautiful and the characters brought back to me the folk tales of my childhood. Loved it.
The story that Lanagan tells in this book is a riff on the folktales and mythology about selkies the seal women, who live as seals in the sea but are capable of shedding their sealskins to assume human form. Setting her tale on a remote fishing island, Rollrock, Lanagan has adopted many of the key elements of traditional selkie mythology - the beauty of the selkie women, their desire to return to their seal form and the sea, the human men being besotted with them and hiding their sealskins to prevent their return. What she's changed, however, adds a power and aching to the story that carries out out of "well-told folk story" into something truly great. In Lanagan's conception, the selkies do not simply and voluntarily come forth; they are called out of their seal skins by the skill, or magic, of Misskaella, a local woman who is rejected by her own community for being strange, unlovely, and weird, in the old sense of that word.

The unwisdom and ultimate misery of trying to deny nature, and the painfulness of dividing a heart between two worlds, underscores all the plaintive emotion in this book. Ultimately, Misskaella's charms serve as a kind of sickly glamour that can only be cured by the love of a son for his mother, a love and sacrifice that he exercises in the same way that the witch herself gives her beloved sons back to the sea. It is such a powerful, heart-tearing cycle, and Lanagan lets it settle in without ever over-egging the pudding, allowing the many strands of this tangled web to reveal themselves as the story progresses.

As to how this book made me feel Terribly sad. Enormous unnameable longing. Beautiful and powerful. Compassionate, for all the flawed people and all their little sins that led them to this end.

It is a wonderful, life-infusing book. I really don't care if you don't normally like fantasy or folklore-type fiction; please believe me, this is worth departing from type for. Read it and you will know why.
Bought on the strength of a Canberra Times review, this collection of tales about the 'sea wives' of Rollrock Island was completely mesmerising! Based on the legends of Selkies, women who emerge from seals' bodies, marry land-dwelling men, then return to the sea, if their seal skins are not hidden from them.
This story is written in seven parts, each dealing almost chronologically with the story of how the witch, Misskaella, learns how to draw women out of the seals that flock around this northern sea island. The seal-wives are beautiful, tall, slim, with long dark hair. No comparison with the Rollrock women, who are red-haired, freckled, and bow-legged.
Eventually all the Rollrock men take a seal-wife, and then all the non-seal-wives leave Rollrock for the mainland!
Daughters of these marriages have to be returned to the sea, to provide more seal-wives presumably.
The sons worry about their 'mams' who are pining for their ocean life, and a plan is devised to set them free. However, the wives know a way to take their boys too..
Poignant and very touching, Lanagan's story brings the legend to life. I didn't want it to end!