A Mercy
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the story of a mother and a daughter—a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
“Spellbinding. . . . Dazzling. . . . [A Mercy] stands alongside Beloved as a unique triumph.” —The Washington Post Book World
In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.
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Community Reviews
I've noticed as I get further and further into Toni Morrison's novels, going from the early and the acclaimed ones to the lesser known, that the quality and especially the memorability of the stories significantly drops. She feels this need to give every minor character an elaborate backstory. She gets too lost in interior monologues and poetic language without purpose. When you get to the end, you feel like practically nothing has happened and like you haven't learned anything that wasn't either the explicit or the probable implication of the summary on the back of the book. And she just keeps returning to the same tropes over and over, too. The lack of variety is slightly less of a problem with A Mercy because of its setting - the late 17th century, an atmosphere of extreme and often delusional fanatic religiosity - not to mention actually spending some time in the heads of white characters, which I don't think I've read her doing before, though I wouldn't swear to it. But she was very much up to her old tricks with this one - alternating chapters between first person impressionistic interior monologue that doesn't make a ton of sense at first and chapters of more lucid prose that still jump around between memory and the present, spending most of their time in the past. Each of the latter style of chapters is told from a different character's perspective, but because it is almost entirely recollection you sometimes don't get a very good sense of how all this matters to the present tense. Sometimes you do. But it's just very inconsistent and gets so lost in telling individual stories of sometimes very minor and unnecessary characters that it totally detracts from the main characters we're supposed to care about. I just really didn't enjoy this one very much.
What's better than reading a Toni Morrison novel? Having her read one to you! I listened to this novel, read by the author, which included an interview with the author at the end. I confess, I lost the thread of the story a couple of times, just savoring the language and images presented. This was a story of love and betrayal, of connections among people thrown together arbitrarily. Each has a tale to tell and Morrison gives us a view into each character individually, complete with their history and patterns of connection.
The narrator's voice changes frequently through the novel - providing insight into each character, not just the primaries: Lina, Sorrow, Florens, Rebecca, jacob, Florens' mother. Will...each narrates his/her view of the unfolding tale.
The narrator's voice changes frequently through the novel - providing insight into each character, not just the primaries: Lina, Sorrow, Florens, Rebecca, jacob, Florens' mother. Will...each narrates his/her view of the unfolding tale.
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