Sea Creatures

Reviews / Votes

"A captivating, haunting novel about the complexities of the human heart and its attachments, terrain as slippery and beautiful and disaster prone as Daniel's South Florida." -- Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone "There's a charmer at the heart of Sea Creatures...Almost like an action-filled, emotional memoir...Gripping." -- Associated Press "While Miami has inspired its satirical works of genius, chilling mystery novels and excellent accounts of Cuban exile, we've mostly run short on first-rate literature that takes the city seriously enough to capture its eccentricities without flinching...Daniel, with Sea Creatures, gets it absolutely pitch perfect." -- Miami Herald "A tender tale of a woman navigating the responsibilities and risks of parenthood." -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Don't confuse the waterfront setting with light beach reading; this is substantive domestic drama...readers interested in families coping with disabilities will find Frankie particularly compelling as he navigates changing relationships and obstacles." -- Library Journal "Daniel returns to Stiltsville's South Florida in a second novel filled with domestic upheaval, difficult choices, and far-reaching consequences...Daniel's verdant descriptions of salt and sea continue to shine, as does her portrayal of a mother struggling to protect her son." -- Publishers Weekly "A sophisticated story that holds the reader rapt...[Daniel] sets up each scene in Sea Creatures with masterful strokes...She builds momentum from the opening chapter, leading up to the crescendo...Daniel drives into tumultuous waters and emerges with a mesmerizing, beautiful novel." -- Jeanna Kolker, Wisconsin State Journal "Utterly enthralling...[Sea Creatures is] about love, loss, and longing in their most familiar forms. Brace yourself: you'll fall hard for the characters, and your heartwill break preemptively-even before the hurricane blows through." -- Catherine Newman, More.com "What I found most stirring in Sea Creatures is how deftly Daniels exposes one of the most agonizing realities of parenthood: that no matter how hard we try, or how endless our love for our children, we are hampered by our own limitations, sometimes even tragically." -- Helen Schulman, author of This Beautiful Life "Susanna Daniel brings an uncommon intimacy to her characters' lives, and also to the landscape where those lives unfold-a cartographer not only of the shore and the ocean but of the passions, bruises, joys, and insufficiencies of the human heart." -- Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead "An intelligent page-turner (that is, the dream combination) about, among other things, South Florida, art, insomnia, and marriage." -- Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep and Sisterland "Daniel's writing is rich in description-of both its lush Florida settings and her characters' emotional landscapes-that draws the reader in." -- Isthmus Review "Sea Creatures is perfect for summer reading, a more literary offering than your usual beach fare. Author Susanna Daniel crafts beautiful, dreamy descriptions of ocean life that threaten to lull readers into a sense of complacency." -- The Daily News Journal (Tennessee)