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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307264237
ISBN: 0307264238
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: November 11, 2008
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: November 11, 2008
Sales Rank: 50
Studio: Knopf
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize–winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.
In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root.
Jacob 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, “with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady.” Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who’s spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens’ mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.
A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
Acts of mercy may have unforeseen consequences.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
A friend and I were talking a few months back about Madame Nobel Laureate, Toni, and why we both shake our heads at the dismissal of a truly brave artist such as Alice Walker. So what am I doing on this page other than I couldn't help but give this new, slender novel a read?(--which is exactly what I did over the holidays). My complaint with Toni is her almost obsessive exploration of the slave wound. That's the first thing. Not that I think this subject isn't worthy, it clearly is. But Morrison ... Read More
Rating:  -
The story was excellent as the author style came shining through. However the book itself has uneven edges as though it was cut uneven, I have never had a book in this condition. Disappointed with the quality of pages.
Rating:  -
Let me preface this by saying that this is the first work of Toni Morrison's that I have read. Now I know that it will not be my last. It's nearing 3 AM where I am now, and I have just finished this overwhelming novel. I will make every effort to convey my thoughts coherently enough to do justice to this wonderful book.
I of course knew that Ms. Morrison's legacy as a giant of American literature included a history of notoriously difficult prose, and so I approached this novel with an ... Read More
Rating: -
I am astounded by this woman's genius but I have to say the last few years she's slacked off (Love, Paradise). I like A MERCY but not with the passionate urgency I usually rip through a Morrison masterpiece.
So far on my Kindle, I've not been riveted.
That is until this afteroon.
This afternoon I started reading the very poetic memoir by Osama Bin laden's ex mistress Kola Boof (Diary of a Lost Girl) and it's so good I had to make myself take a break so I wouldn't ... Read More
Rating: -
Five years after he last novel Love, Morrison returns to spin her magic in the novel A Mercy which only proves to be worth the wait. If you can keep up, that is.
The story opens up with a "confession" from the protagonist, a 16-year-old slave girl named Florens, with hands of a slave and feet of a Portuguese lady. She warns of a bloody story to be told as the reader muddles through what is admittedly a difficult narrator to follow. But Florens's present-tense stream of consciousness is easily ... Read More
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