Author: Toni Morrison
Year published: 2009
Category: Adult fiction (historical)
Pages: 208 pages
Rating: 3.75 out of 5
Location: (my 2026 Google Reading map): USA (MD)
Summary: 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.
Review: I enjoy doing First Book with Sheila at Book Journey as part of the larger blogging community. Often, I choose a book that is popular or one that I meant to read in the previous year, but didn't get to. This year, I chose A Mercy for a number of reasons: it's Toni Morrison (enough said); and it's about enslavement and finding love/support (two things that seem big in the world right now). I've previously read an enjoyed the following Morrison novels: Sula, Beloved, The Bluest Eye.
Though this book is slim at only 208 pages, it is intense and packs a punch, not really a surprise given who the author is. I did find it a bit of a difficult read because Morrison wrote in the vernacular she assumes an enslaved person in the late 1600s would have spoken. In addition, there is not much punctuation; it has very long paragraphs (often over a page); there are no quotation marks; and the word order/choices are so different from now. I wonder if the audio would have been better for me.
While the story is impactful and well told, it was also confusing. Which character was speaking (there are 4 not-clearly marked sections, each with a different narrator), and is it the present or the past (it switches without explanation)?
While this book was a struggle for me (I hope it doesn't portend a negative reading trend for 2026), I htink the story is an important one, showing the disregard for human life in the Atlantic slave trade and in early years in the USA.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Alphabet (Author)--M
- Alphabet (Title)--M
- Cover Lover--a title that does not include the words "the" or "and"
- Immigration--Atlantic slave trade to the USA
- Literary Escapes--USA, Maryland
- Mount TBR
No comments
Post a Comment