Sea Creatures audiobook

Beautifully written, this is one of my favorite chic-lit books. The story involves family, motherhood, being a daughter, marriage, and starting over. Daniel’s writing style is lyrical and perfectly paced. Towards the end of the novel, it becomes a suspense novel. It’s written from Georgia Quillian’s point of view. It begins as she and her husband, Graham, are starting over in Miami(Georgia’s childhood home town). The reader learns of Graham’s sleep disorder, parasomnia, and the stress this has caused on the family, along with this disorder being the major reason that the family was forced to start over in Miami. There are marriage problems: Georgia doesn’t think Graham is a good father; Graham feels Georgia has lost her spontaneity. Georgia and Graham have a 3 year old son, Frankie, who mysteriously stopped speaking when he was 18 months old. Georgia works with him in learning sign language so he can communicate. Graham feels they should force him to speak. Issues in child rearing add to the domestic problems. Georgia discusses marriage with her childhood friend Sally, who sums up her marriage “I don’t love him like I did. But I love him in a new way, and we are in this thing together. We are going to raise these children or die trying.” Georgia thinks what many mothers feel “Sometimes I think that when I had Frankie, I became a little bit crazy. And a little bit invisible.” Georgia decides to take a part time job as an assistant to an artist who is a bit of a recluse. A friendship builds with the artist, Charlie, who is kind and thoughtful to Frankie. Parenting and being a good mother are a major themes in this novel. There are heart-wrenching scenes. I was emotionally involved in Georgia’s life. I felt her feelings, and understood her self doubts. Daniels is a wonderful author.

I loved this book. I wrote about it on my Tumblr: http://roxanegay.tumblr.com/post/6890...

Few writers can capture the angst of the human condition, wrap it into a lyrical tale of time and place, and tell a compelling, page turning story yet Susanna Daniel manages to accomplish all of this in her latest novel, Sea Creatures. In the opening pages readers are introduced to Georgia Quillian in 1992, as she and her husband, Graham, and their three year old son Frankie are en route to her home town of Miami. Georgia’s business has failed, and they have has endured a bit of scandal related to Graham’s sleep disorder. To make matters worse, Frankie is selectively mute, a fact that has put additional strain on the marriage. At the age of thirty six Georgia is feeling a bit like a failure, somewhat unmoored by her present situation and unsure of her shifting roles as wife and mother. Unsure of their next steps the family is welcomed home by Georgia’s father and stepmother and offered the slip behind their home where they intend to live aboard a houseboat. When Georgia accepts a part time job delivering supplies to a hermit in nearby Stiltsville, the group of homes on stilts built out in the midst of Biscayne Bay, she has no idea the many ways her life will change. Before long Georgia is forced to choose between the woman she once was and the woman she has become, this will also entail choosing between her marriage, her son, and the possibility of new love. Sea Creatures is a novel to become lost within; filled with vivid descriptions of natural world, and keen insight into the workings of the human heart, it is a novel to be cherished.

Georgia, Daniel’s main character and sole narrator, was a protagonist I not only liked but with whom I sympathized and empathized. I put myself in her place and understood the great weight she carried on her thin shoulders. I absolutely hated Graham, Georgia’s husband, who suffered from parasomnia, a condition in which he experienced an erratic sleep pattern. He sometimes sleepwalked. “Sleep was the yardstick by which all other fears were measured, and everything else dwarfed. It’s the stuff of horror films, sleep terror, but the sleep goblins of film are imaginary. Graham’s problems were real, and all the more alarming for their unpredictability.” SeaCreatures_3DBookshotDespite having parasomnia, Graham scoffed at his son Frankie’s selective mutism. This, I must confess, was the ultimate of his transgressions for me. Graham seemed to want Frankie to be “normal,” when Graham himself had medical problems.Daniel expertly underscored how parenthood can change a marriage. Georgia just could not understand her husband’s mindset, “Sometimes I thought that in becoming a parent, I’d morphed into an entirely different person, while he’d remained exactly the same person he’d always been.” As Daniel’s tale progressed, husband and wife only withdrew farther and farther away from each other.Georgia and Frankie, though, grew even closer. Frankie stole my heart time and again in this novel. “Just as he’d started to speak words, he’d stopped…[The doctors] quizzed me about my marriage and about Graham and his parasomnia, which led me to understand that children in difficult homes sometimes go mute….” Frankie finally found his voice thanks to Charlie the hermit.I loved the transformation in which Charlie’s character underwent. Like Frankie, he discovered a part of himself that had been closed off for years. Sea Creatures came to dazzling and vivid life whenever Georgia and Frankie visited Charlie in Stiltsville. Those passages just hummed with energy.683af41910938771f187ff55921f44d6I could not help but hope that Georgia and Charlie would develop a lasting romance. Of course, I also hoped she would give Graham the boot. Everything comes to a shuddering climax as Hurricane Andrew approaches South Florida, lending a threatening, uncertain atmosphere to the story: “The course of a life will shift—really shift—many times over the years. But rarely will there be a shift that you can feel gathering in the distance like a storm, rarely will you notice the pressure drop before the skies open.” Indeed, the hurricane heralded a new chapter for Daniel's characters. For them, everything changed. Just as residents of South Florida cleaned up after the storm, the people in Daniel's novel must pick up the pieces of their tattered and torn lives.Thus, Daniel adeptly weaved together various conflicts throughout her narrative, cleverly moving from man against man to man against himself to man against nature. The plot of Sea Creatures expertly revolved around these struggles.All in all, Daniel’s second book was an absorbing, lyrical journey. Sea Creatures left me spellbound, sleepless, speechless, and completely oblivious to the rest of the world.

This was another book that surprised me with how really good it was. This is a lovely story about all kinds of love with a little turbulence thrown in there. There is a part of the story about a man who has a sleep disorder There is a part about a young boy involved in a horrible accident and then there's the man who lives in a stilt house off the coast of Miami. Thrown in with all this are all the family members related to these 3 people. Very interesting story told from the viewpoint of the wife/mother. Another book that I could not stop reading once I got into it

Full review here: http://everydayiwritethebookblog.com/...Sea Creatures by Susanna Daniel is one of those books that makes you feel lonely while reading it. I don’t mean that in a bad way; it’s just that there is a lot of sadness and isolation in this book that permeates even the experience of reading it.Sea Creatures takes place in Miami, like Daniel’s earlier novel Stiltsville. Georgia and Graham Quillian have moved to Miami from their home in Chicago, along with their three year-old son, Frankie. The family has undergone a lot of stress: Frankie has stopped speaking altogether, and Graham, a parasomniac, was forced to leave Chicago because of some incidents that occurred at night while he was sleepwalking. His extreme sleep issues have put a tremendous strain on the family, but they’ve decided to start over fresh living on an houseboat on a canal outside Georgia’s father and stepmother’s house.The first half of the book establishes Georgia and Graham in their new home, and explores their past as well as Frankie’s selective mutism, which Georgia has learned to accommodate. As she gets to the heart of why Frankie no longer communicates verbally, Graham becomes increasingly resentful of her enabling Frankie and, as he sees it, continually choosing Frankie over him. Their marriage becomes more and more distant, to the point where he takes a months-long job on a ship studying hurricanes, and Georgia starts working for an older man with his own troubled past with whom she develops a complicated relationship.Ultimately, Sea Creatures is about parenthood - sacrifices we make to keep our kids safe and mistakes in judgment that sometimes have ramifications far beyond what we feared. There is a lot else going on in Sea Creatures: a lot of sadness and death, marriages and divorce, and the hugely important roles played by Miami and its distinctive weather and neighborhoods and Graham’s sleep disorder. It’s a sad book, for sure, but it’s also rich and thought-provoking. I found it lonely, I think, because so much of it takes place in Georgia’s mind. She kept so many of her feelings to herself, and bore the burden of many difficult things going on around her. She was frustrating at times – for someone who was so in touch with her son and his needs, she could be oddly lax about things like vaccines and the need for pre-school – and made some choices that were clearly not well-founded. But of course, that’s what propelled the story and made Sea Creatures the engrossing story that it is.So, if you’re looking for a melancholy, moody read that will also make you want to move to Florida and live on the water (something I’ve never been interested in doing before), give Sea Creatures a try. Just be prepared to feel a little lonely. Incidentally, I think Sea Creatures would make an excellent book club choice – lots to discuss here.

(originally published at http://nomadreader.blogspot.com)The backstory: When I read Susanna Daniel's debut novel, Stiltsville, I gushed that "it's the most emotionally engaging novel I've read in quite some time." It not only made my top ten of 2010, it came in at number two. Given my love for Stiltsville, I was eager to see Daniel return to Miami with her second novel, Sea Creatures. The basics: In 1992, Georgia's college admissions consulting business has failed. When her husband Graham doesn't receive tenure at Northwestern, they move back to her native Miami, where a friend of Graham's has offered him a job studying hurricanes. Their three-year-old son Frankie hasn't spoken for eighteen months, but there seems to be no medical reason why. My thoughts: I foolishly sat down to start reading Sea Creatures before work one morning, and it was a struggle to not call in sick. One again, Daniel's writing captured me from the opening page. It's the first print book to capture me with writing and character since I read Curtis Sittenfeld's Sisterland last month.Georgia narrates her story from the future, which gives an air of importance to all of the novel's events. There  is also a poignancy to her story, one that perhaps only reflecting on the events yet to come for the reader. The result is a brilliantly plotted, masterful contemporary novel. When I turned the last page, I was in awe of how much Daniel fit into the novel. Each character, even the minor ones, are fully formed. Parts of the novel feel like an epic, as Daniel fills the story with past, present and future. Favorite passage: "People speak of strength in times of crisis, as if strength were some great beast that swoops in to gird us, to repair our voices and limbs when it seems they might fail. But to this day, I don't know exactly what we mean when we speak of strength." The verdict: Sea Creatures is the best book I've read in 2013. It's a beautiful, intelligent, and heart-wrenching novel, and I hope it becomes a modern classic.

They fled from the home they had in Illinois, back to Miami where Georgia had grown up. Graham, Georgia, and their three-year-old son Frankie were trailing scandal and disappointment in their wake.Their flight followed a string of incidents related to Graham's sleep disorder. They would settle in a houseboat in the canal behind the home owned by Georgia's father and stepmother. They were hoping for a chance to start over.But soon the problems would resurface. When Graham takes a job that keeps him away from them for weeks at a time, they can almost forget the problems. The niggle of doubt remains, however.Then Georgia starts working as an assistant for a man named Charlie. Nicknamed "The Hermit," he lives in one of the stilt houses in the bay, and is an artist. Frankie accompanies his mother to the stilt house when she works, and soon is bonded to Charlie and loving the life on the water, as well as the sea inhabitants.As I read "Sea Creatures," I was reminded of the previous novel, "Stiltsville: A Novel," as some of the characters from that novel showed up in this one. I was also drawn into the watery world that defined these characters, the foreboding that precedes hurricane season, and the constant dread about Graham and the threat he might pose.Narrated in Georgia's first person voice, we learn about her, her relationships, and the family dynamics, as the story moves back and forth over the years.And as we follow along, there are questions that are slowly answered. Like why does Frankie stop speaking at the age of eighteen months? What events might have triggered this loss? How can Georgia help her son find his voice again, while still saving her family? What horrible event happens just before Hurricane Andrew that would change everything for her?The story begins by showing what has happened and revealing bits and pieces of the new life they are creating. But always there is that sense of foreshadowing. That feeling that something horrific will happen that will destroy their hope. The characters felt so real, and as I watched them connect and then disengage, I felt such a sadness, as if the losses were my own. An emotional read that will stay with me. Five stars.

Sea CreaturesBySusanna DanielI have always been a reader...a lifelong reader...but one of the first books I read as a blogger/reviewer was Stiltsville by this author. It was overwhelmingly breathtakingly lovely. It was laden with Florida history, it was character driven and throughout it was the ocean...the beautiful powerful scary ocean and all of it's amazing creatures. When I chose this book...I didn't fully realize that it was written by my beloved Stiltsville author! When I finally made the connection...I worried...I worried that I could not love it the way I loved Stiltsville. How silly and wrong I was! This is another book that takes place in Florida...Miami, actually. It is Georgia's story of her life with her young son Frankie...who is selectively mute...and her husband Graham...who has that horrible sleep disorder where you never sleep and where you do horrible things while you are in that sleepwalking phase. Graham has scared neighbors, caused damage and lost tenure because of this disorder. This family needs a fresh start so they return to Miami...where Georgia was raised. They buy a houseboat, Graham gets another research position, Georgia becomes an assistant to Charlie and they try to get the help that Frankie needs to begin to talk again.Charlie...older, hermit like, lives in a Stiltsville house...with secrets of his own. Georgia becomes his assistant. A few days a week she and Frankie boat out to his house with supplies. A bond grows between them. Charlie sees very few people but begins to love seeing Georgia and Frankie. Their relationship is complex but this book is laden with complex relationships. I am learning that Susanna Daniel's books have surprises...surprises that take your breath away...surprises that delight...and surprises that break your heart and make you sob...I loved this book. I can't even begin to tell you how wonderful it is. The characters, the way she writes...just truly wonderful. I know this is cliche but I didn't want this book to end and yet I couldn't put it down. It was beautiful...sad...lovely...beautiful.

Thanks to the weather I actually had time to sit and read like I used to and finished this one in 2 days. It definitely kept me interested. I really liked Georgia's voice. I found the way she deals with loss and pain very relatable. Overall a very good read.

Bizarre character and situational backgrounds make this one interesting. Severe insomnia, childhood trauma, houses on stilts, Hurricane Andrew...and the kitchen sink. This one explores so many reasons why people should be licensed to raise children, and how those too immature to take care of themselves still end up doing their best in raising a child, with mixed results. It's also why a license to marry isn't a guarantee that'll work out for the best either. Humans are ridiculous, and this group of misfit toys makes the book work. Lots to hash out at book club, folks.

Since I am part fish, I loved all the fishy critters in this book and a house on stilts surrounded by warm sea water would be a dream come true for me. The setting was welcome and the characters interesting.I highlighted this, "The course of a life will shift--really shift--many times over the years. But rarely will there be a shift that you can feel gathering in the distance like a storm, rarely will you notice the pressure drop before the skies open. That morning . . . I'd known on some level that this was one of those times. I would like to believe that I wouldn't again make the mistake of walking in blindly. Than again, blindly is the only way I would have walked in."I thought this wise and true when i read it on page 43. But I found the tragedy in this book to be overly foreshadowed and underly manifest when all was said and done. Her reaction to her husband seemed out of proportion and her son turned out to be fine. Since it was written in the first person, we hear alot of her inner musings, but it seemed like her inner world wasn't often revealed to those around her. The greatest tragedy was for her husband, a sympathetic character who takes the blame and pays the ultimate price.

The title is a little misleading--it certainly is not an exciting sea adventure about exotic underwater creatures. But the book certainly is full of action. The characters are really likable--even when they start off on the wrong foot in the story, in the end, there just are not any villains. The writing style is smooth, easy reading and skilled. If you are looking for a 'happily ever after' book, you might want to pass Sea Creatures by. There is a very dark element to the story even when most things wash out ok in the end. The author certainly ties up all loose ends just when the reader thinks there are some unanswered questions. All in all, an excellent read.

3.75 rounded up to 4. Susanna Daniel is an excellent writer. She builds the story like a intricate Lego project. Each brick of detail makes the plot grow bigger and bigger. A husband, wife and their small mute son are fleeing the Midwest to resettle in Florida at the wife's family home. Slowly their story unravels through the painful voice of the wife and mother. She is one tortured narrator. To get the full impact of simmering terror, one should go into it like I did knowing nothing and suffer the reveal.