Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

by Jennifer Tseng

Overview

PEN Award Finalist: “A sense of longing suffuses Tseng’s sexy, sad debut novel” about a librarian obsessed with a teenage boy (Kirkus Reviews).

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 mundaneness of her life. 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.

“Jennifer Tseng delivers an elegant exploration of passion and its consequences while casting her observant eye on motherhood, memory, exile, and female friendship. Carnal, witty, and slyly crafted, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness is a sizzling fuse of a novel, with an explosion bigger and better than anything you can imagine.” —Sara Levine, author of Treasure Island!!!

“An uncannily apt elucidation of the way sadness can leave a person adrift, and how love can make even a very isolated person feel, momentarily, perhaps delusionally, less alone.” —Elle

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609452780
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	03/23/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
Sales rank:	382,928
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Jennifer Tseng’s first book The Man With My Face won the 2005 Asian American Writers' Workshop's National Poetry Manuscript Competition and a 2006 PEN American Center Open Book Award. Her second book Red Flower, White Flower, winner of the Marick Press Poetry Prize, features Chinese translations by Mengying Han and Aaron Crippen. Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness is her debut novel. She works at the West Tisbury Library on Martha’s Vineyard.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Mayumi and The Sea of Happiness

"Mayumi’s trespasses and thrills are so deeply imagined that I lived her affair with her, cheering her even as I knew I would drown with her in her ecstasy. This book’s fierce physicality glitters beneath the surface of every heady sentence.”—Susanna Daniel, author of Stilsville and Sea Creatures

“Jennifer Tseng delivers an elegant exploration of passion and its consequences while casting her observant eye on motherhood, memory, exile, and female friendship. Carnal, witty, and slyly crafted, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness is a sizzling fuse of a novel, with an explosion bigger and better than anything you can imagine.”—Sara Levine, author of Treasure Island!!!

"This is a confession that reads like an exultation, and Mayumi’s gleeful admissions will likely keep the reader turning pages at the kind of speed that inspires papercuts.”—The Seattle Review of Books

"Enthralling...[a] unique, beguiling tale."—Electric Literature

“The love scenes don't lack for erotic description and detail, and Mayumi's obsessive admiration for the young man swings between coolly perceptive and discomfitingly overheated. But the precision and poetry of Tseng's writing keep the book from meandering too far in the direction [of pure romance]...Tseng explores time and place, isolation and connection, and veers more toward the lyrical than the lurid.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2015-03-04
A sense of longing suffuses Tseng's sexy, sad debut novel about a 41-year-old librarian who embarks on an affair with a shy, handsome high school student. Readers of literary fiction might be turned off by the premise of award-winning poet Tseng's (Red Flower, White Flower, 2013, etc.) debut novel, which sounds suspiciously like a bodice-ripper: Mayumi, a librarian living on an island off the New England coast that empties in the offseason—emotionally marooned in a loveless marriage, clinging for warmth to her 4-year-old daughter, and drifting toward middle age—finds unlikely, forbidden love and gasp-inducing passion in the arms of an alluring 17-year-old just leaving the safe harbor of his boyhood. Aware of the dangers and abashed at the Nabokov-ian overtones, Mayumi nevertheless handily introduces the young man, whom she never names, to the pleasures of sex and literature. He buoys her with his youth and beauty, saving her from sinking deeper into isolation. And then there's the young man's mother, to whom Mayumi also finds herself drawn and with whom she forges a relationship. The slow, inevitable tectonic intersection of these three lives leads, ultimately, to calamity, though not in the way you might predict. Yet, in other regards, the interconnection also holds the key to their survival, providing pockets of pure joy that keep them afloat amid despair. So, sure, this does at times read like a romance with particular middle-aged-mom appeal; its love scenes don't lack for erotic description and detail, and Mayumi's obsessive admiration for the young man swings between coolly perceptive and discomfitingly overheated. But the precision and poetry of Tseng's writing keep the book from meandering too far in that direction, and the emotional and physical landscapes she conjures—the snow-covered vistas, cozy hidden cottages, and jewellike spring-fed ponds—make it worth the visit.Tseng explores time and place, isolation and connection, and veers more toward the lyrical than the lurid.

Kirkus Reviews