While I liked "The Secret Life of Bees," I was not wowed by it like other readers. I felt that Sue Monk Kidd was a very good writer with a keen eye for description, but less successful at creating an emotional plot that rang true and poignant - not overly sentimental.I borrowed "The Mermaid Chair" from a friend, and am glad I did not buy it myself. This book is even more hopelessly sentimental than Sue Monk Kidd's first effort. Kidd's tendency to romanticize the confusion and heartache of a woman searching for her identity is tedious at best, maddening at worst. While the book is filled with beautiful, lush descriptions of island life and the stark beauty of faith and yearning, her "romance genre" conventions and predictable stock characters (such as the "colorful native" Hepzibah) bog down the plot and make "The Mermaid Chair" a superficial and unsatisfying read.