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A Mercy

3.58 of 5 stars 3.58 · rating details · 9,769 ratings · 1,777 reviews

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 ha...more

Hardcover, 167 pages

Published November 11th 2008 by Knopf (first published January 1st 2008)

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Jan 04, 2009 Jessica rated it 3 of 5 stars

Back in college I took a course on Colonial America because I had to. It was pretty tough for me to get into it at the time, since I never really gave a crap about that inaccessible and unglamorous period. I wish this book had been around in those days, because Morrison's efforts to describe that bizarre and confusing world might've helped me get better picture of the time, and therefore care more about what I was learning. To me, A Mercy really is incredible historical fiction that provides acc...more Back in college I took a course on Colonial America because I had to. It was pretty tough for me to get into it at the time, since I never really gave a crap about that inaccessible and unglamorous period. I wish this book had been around in those days, because Morrison's efforts to describe that bizarre and confusing world might've helped me get better picture of the time, and therefore care more about what I was learning. To me, A Mercy really is incredible historical fiction that provides access to a strange time and the people who lived in it. Morrison exposes the insides of her seventeenth-century characters in a way that made them sympathetic and comprehensible, though still remote and unfamiliar, even foreign. I didn't feel I could relate to these people at all, which for me was part of the point -- what do I have in common with someone living four hundred years ago? -- but also kept me feeling somewhat detached for the first two thirds of the novel. I enjoyed it, but I didn't really freak out about this book the way some other Booksters did until the last few chapters, which were totally fabulous and really did blow my mind.

Recently on here there was some friendly (I think) bickering about Howard Zinn's People's History of the US and the whole question of multiculturalism and revisionist history. Although it's fiction, A Mercy is an almost perfect example of how I like my American history served: organic, unflinching, and successfully synthesizing, rather than just reacting against previous histories. In A Mercy, Morrison tears away the veil of idealism and whitewashing to stare unflinchingly at the myth of America, then unapologetically celebrates that very myth (it seemed to me), and it's pretty extraordinary. There's one passage in here about a character leaving the cramped, violent filth of Europe for the fresh, clean, virginal Eden of the New World, and it just gave me chills. I mean, it's really spectacular! She writes about all this slavery and sexual violence and persecution and disease in a way that lets you imagine what it was like to live in that era, and somehow, paradoxically, it makes the classic American myths -- especially the myth of freedom -- seem true for the first time, in a new way.... if that makes any sense. Morrison captures the complexity and brutality of Colonial America, cataloguing the various ways there were to be unfree (slavery, indentured servitude, marriage, etc.) through a multiethnic cast of characters who she's able to write as both weighty symbols and deeply human individuals in a way only Toni Morrison -- and almost no one else -- is able to get away with. The chapters are written from the perspectives of the various characters, in this unbelievable Morrisonesque language that will make you freak out. Yeah, this book probably will make you freak out.... Plus, it's super short! It's also a really interesting perspective on the legacy of American slavery, that recontextualizes it in a much earlier, more northern setting than most treatments, and gets into some different questions and issues than a lot of us are probably used to. Also, did I mention this lady can write?

So yeah, in closing: I wasn't competely nuts about this, and especially at the beginning I had a couple weird moments where I almost felt like I was reading a trashy romance novel -- because of the subject matter, not the style -- but it was a good book, and I do recommend it.(less)

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Dec 27, 2008 brian rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to brian by: Ruth, Mike Reynolds

having never read toni morrison, i felt it could be a mistake to pick up her newest book, particular it being one so late in her career -- this can really be the kiss of death... i mean imagine judging bowie’s career after having only heard Tonight? or dylan’s after listening to Saved?

i resisted morrison for years -- saw her as kind of the literary equivalent of morgan freeman perpetually playing a variation of the ‘magical negro’… y’know, the wise, deep-voiced, saintly guy who pretty much exis...more

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Oct 05, 2009 D. Pow rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy is one of the most infuriating, lovely, haunted and haunting works I’ve read in many a moon. It is one of the few books I can remember that sent me back to read key passages and even whole chapters after I finished it to get clues to its maddeningly vague denouement and sample the blood-soaked, well-seeded soil of its prose one more time. I didn’t reread anything in frustration, but in gratitude and admiration.

A Mercy is set ostensibly in the late 17th century, a fact I...more Toni Morrison’s A Mercy is one of the most infuriating, lovely, haunted and haunting works I’ve read in many a moon. It is one of the few books I can remember that sent me back to read key passages and even whole chapters after I finished it to get clues to its maddeningly vague denouement and sample the blood-soaked, well-seeded soil of its prose one more time. I didn’t reread anything in frustration, but in gratitude and admiration.

A Mercy is set ostensibly in the late 17th century, a fact I didn’t believe for a minute and yet strangely didn’t bother me in the least. While the book lacks the heavy weight of multiple and minute details that grant the usual work of historical fiction verisimilitude, it also doesn’t contain any howling anachronisms that hurl the reader out of the spell being cast. I feel more than a hard scrabble colonial era farm in an America barely shed of its birth caul, A Mercy is instead set in a place called ‘Morrisonland’, a gothic, sinister place suffused with lust, longing, confusions of identity and thwarted passions and improbable fates. It is a place that exists simultaneously only in the mind of its author and is a perfect representation of one aspect of America’s fucked up soul. It is a pagan place, not a Christian one, full of dark ritual, demons and a sprit-infused geography that telegraphs well impending tragedy for those with eyes to see.

As in all Morrison books, race is central, skin colors of all grades on display throughout in a mad dance of slavery, ownership, parent and discarded child, victim and potential killer. But Morrison is too canny and wise to write a book that is a straight up indictment of the huge festering wound that is the American subjugation of African and Native American people. Everyone wrestles with their own slavery in this book, whether it is to ideas of mercantile ascension and social respect, loveless marriage, or thralldom to a land that will break bones before it yields anything that offers anything remotely resembling sustenance.
Morrison plants a few seeds of traditional romance within the narrative that point to the possibility of one character, the slave girl, Florens, escaping to a better fate via a freed African blacksmith and their intense physical relationship that develops. But once again Morrison is too true to her own darker gifts for any fairy tale ending where the princess is rescued and taken to some magic kingdom free of bitterness and strife. Instead, as in real life, a lesser fate and shadow identity is assumed where one that was hopefully headed for an upward trajectory is cast down utterly into blank confusion through her own befuddled mind and over-attachment to the lures of the body and a fantasy future that was always unlikely at best.

It’s a tough ending, one if written by anyone other than Morrison might sparks of racism and sexism but the hard ending is foreshadowed with great effectiveness and anyone expecting all to end well in this stretch fly infested swampland wasn’t reading the text closely enough or else read too many Harlequins when they were younger. And while the ending is bitter and hard there are also grace notes of redemption, of life merely going on, of other wounded ones becoming ‘Complete’ that offer partial recompense for this harsh vision, making not wholly bleak, but tinged with small sweetness, like a flower bloomed in shadow.

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Feb 11, 2009 Jen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: lit-fic, sisters-book-club

From my youngest sister, who reads often and prefers "Austenish" lit: "It was confusing and hard to get into and I didn't like the ending, but I did like that we heard every person's side of events. I still like my picks "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and "The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie Society" best."

From my middle sister, who is not a big reader and likes "family smut" (aka divorcee single mother who has had it hard and then finds love in the shape of a Tarzan woodsman living alone and horny in the...more From my youngest sister, who reads often and prefers "Austenish" lit: "It was confusing and hard to get into and I didn't like the ending, but I did like that we heard every person's side of events. I still like my picks "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and "The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie Society" best."

From my middle sister, who is not a big reader and likes "family smut" (aka divorcee single mother who has had it hard and then finds love in the shape of a Tarzan woodsman living alone and horny in the Rockies) and books like "the Shack" and "the Notebook": "This was the worst pick I have chosen so far. It took forever to know who was speaking and in the end nothing happened. This wasn't what I thought it would be based on the synopsis on Amazon...I thought it would be about a slave girl and her life. I liked my picks "The Shack" and "The Memory Keepers Daughter more than this."

From me, the literary hungry hippo who has read only "The Bluest Eye" from Toni in addition to "A Mercy": "Gave it almost 80 pages to really get going...chock full of things to analyze and the descriptions and format of the different voices provided early confusion but left a very layered tableau. I loved the ending- the last third of the book was great and really pulled together like strings twisting around and then forming a tight braid. Many similarities to "Bluest Eye"."

I would love to discuss this book with you if you choose to read it...I have a theory snowballing around in my head about what the turning point of the story concerning the slave girl Florens.If you still have the book, look at the part where Florens escapes the cabin with the white girl's help- I think there is a line or two where Florens asks her if she is taken with the devil and the girl smiles and says yes and then Florens feels a spirit or wind or something follow or watch her through the fence. That part is where I thought she fully embraced her darker self, and then from there on she was a primal being, intent on embracing a heady darkness she couldn't control. The indulgence of herself in herself- the selfishness of it all (the blacksmith addresses this) was breathtaking and sudden.

My younger sister thought the boy was just hurt. I thought she might've killed him, and my middle sister wasn't sure- she thought maybe both boy and man were killed or none were killed. What do you think?(less)

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Jul 23, 2008 Elizabeth rated it 3 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. By the end of this novel I felt as though I had finished reading a collection of character sketches that could be used to form a much larger and perhaps more coherent text. Each chapter skips around from one character to another, and from first to third person narration, which in itself is not a problem, and if done well can make an interesting and eclectic whole. In this case, the text simply became frustrating; a puzzle that is frankly not interesting enough to put together.

The characters in...more By the end of this novel I felt as though I had finished reading a collection of character sketches that could be used to form a much larger and perhaps more coherent text. Each chapter skips around from one character to another, and from first to third person narration, which in itself is not a problem, and if done well can make an interesting and eclectic whole. In this case, the text simply became frustrating; a puzzle that is frankly not interesting enough to put together.

The characters in this novel are diverse and could be very interesting if they were given the pages count they need. The characters consist of a Native American slave woman, a black slave woman who has a reputation of "madness," a young black slave girl whose sale to another man was urged on by her own mother, a pair of white atheists (who seem nice at first, but are really like all other whites, bad), a freed young blacksmith, and two indentured men. We learn bits and pieces about each of these people, but never enough to truly care about them. The small histories we are given whet the appetite for more details that are never delivered. After reading Beloved one gets spoiled by the closeness that we can have with characters like Sethe, Denver, and Paul D, but in A Mercy it felt that the characters were being held away from the reader, forcing them to be impersonal. Even in Paradise a novel filled with dozens of characters, the individuals at least seemed more alive than those in Morrison's new text.

Now for the Narrative. I simply do not know what to say as there is so little there. What is the point of the novel? Where do the characters end up? There is little development, and the heart of the story spans perhaps a few days with backlogs giving us a little information about how these people ended up where they are, but the sparse journey and the little history given do not add up to an interesting whole.
Sorrow gives birth to a baby-girl and finds wholeness within that event, but we don't know her. The white woman Rebekka turns violent and cruel, but her betrayal means little because we hardly get to know the good in her which her cruelty is supposed to contrast. And yes, the young woman who was urged to be sold off by her mother is able to pick her sexual partner as her mother intended, but that freedom is so curtailed by the failure of her relationship and the reader's lack of personal connection with her that it barely matters.

I wanted to love and adore this book as I do Beloved, but there is so little that the two books have in common. The utter intimacy that Morrison had to have developed with her characters in Beloved is not even attempted in this book. It is that distance that tears at my heart and makes me wonder if she will explore, and allow us readers to experience, that gut-wrenching sadness, anger, betrayal, again.

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Dec 18, 2011 Kristen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: own, fiction, favorites

I love Toni Morrison, the way she holds out the dark truths of Americas past and forces the reader to look and while the themes here are the same as much of her other work this one is a bit more raw, not the writing which is beautiful as always, but here she just lays it all out in plain sight, here it is motherfuckers, And oh man does she really give it to Christianity good for its part in the oppression of women, slave trade, all around evilness, etc, so you know I was into that and I probably...more

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Nov 17, 2008 Teresa rated it 5 of 5 stars

Yes, I am a Toni Morrison fan and believe she is incapable of writing a bad book, but that doesn't mean I wasn't ready to be critical of her new book if necessary. It's not necessary. The beginning may seem slow (that never bothers me) as we are thrust into a world that is faraway in time, but real. Historical details never bog down; they are worn lightly, as a reviewer put it.

Reviewers have compared one character here to Sethe from "Beloved;" and though I see the parallel, this is a very differ...more

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Jul 13, 2010 Kelly rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: depressing, feminist, lit, fiction

Maybe it's the bitter taste Beloved left me with; Maybe it's that she comes off as the poor woman's Maya Angelou; Maybe it's just that no matter how many how much I want to like her writing, I just can't.

The first four chapters were confusing as hell and the remaining ones were disorienting. The POV's from chapter to chapter were so intertwined, I could barely remember who was talking and found myself constantly going back to the beginning of that particular chapter to double check. Not only th...more

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Jan 29, 2009 Edan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Julia Whicker-Schoolmeester

Recommended to Edan by: Mike Reynolds, Brian Gottlieb

Okay, first thing's first: I clicked this cover because it's terrible and terrifying in its cheesiness and utter stupidity--it's almost offensive in how off base it is. Is this the British version or something? Yes, a girl in A Mercy does insist on wearing shoes at all times, and actually travels in her dead master's boots, but this aspect of the book is no way akin to a kid borrowing her mom's shoes to play pretend, as this cover suggests. This looks like Sasha Obama borrowing Michelle's heels...more

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Jan 03, 2009 Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars

For now--4. [UPDATED to 5. I actually on a whim started rereading, and before I knew it was on about 50, and, yeah, it's amazing.)] This was amazing, and I kind of parcelled it out as a reward in small chunks each night, after drowning in the grading of papers.... It may climb to 5, but give me a few days to think about my reaction.

I will say, in brief: it is a great story, compulsively engaging the reader in terms of plot, untangling its interwoven narrators' stories. And each has a voice--par...more

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Nov 30, 2008 Ksab rated it 3 of 5 stars

Although the subject of "A Mercy" ie the interdependent lives of African slaves,Native Americans,indentured servants,free blacks,and whites in Catholic early Md.-this book was a bit disapppointing. It seemed as if Ms. Morrison wanted/had to crank out a book so did an "abbreviated" version of her usually phenomenal story-telling. the characters were 1/2 developed-almost but "no cigar" as was the story. Hey-Ms. Morrison has had an illustrious career-maybe next time???

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Feb 18, 2009 Edward Waverley rated it 1 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No...more

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Aug 04, 2011 Daniel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"A Mercy" is a book of glimpses into the lives of people who are connected by slavery and the demands of a farm that is located in an undeveloped region of Northern America circa 1680. In the first glimpse, a narrator speaks of regret and change and portents, of sickness and love and hurt. The language is odd and beautiful, combining long sentences that rush to their conclusion while stumbling over incorrect tenses and grammar that punctuate the prose like freckles on someone's skin. The story i...more "A Mercy" is a book of glimpses into the lives of people who are connected by slavery and the demands of a farm that is located in an undeveloped region of Northern America circa 1680. In the first glimpse, a narrator speaks of regret and change and portents, of sickness and love and hurt. The language is odd and beautiful, combining long sentences that rush to their conclusion while stumbling over incorrect tenses and grammar that punctuate the prose like freckles on someone's skin. The story is disconnected and difficult, darting from one topic to another, piling symbols and words atop one another so that one can do nothing but give in and take in what is being said. The narrative breaks, and Morrison switches to the third person, introducing a new character and a setting that is much more familiar. More characters follow, and the where and the why of the story start to coalesce, while the inner lives of the characters stretch out and brush against each other with hazy understandings and inchoate motivations.

"A Mercy" is 196 pages long and the text is printed in a large size with ample white space; were this printed in the usual cramped style, the book would probably be less than half its length. In other words, this is a small work, more a novella than a novel (but, if you're gonna charge 15 a pop, as Vintage has in this edition, the latter heading is more justifiable). Into this diminutive vessel, Morrison pours an incredible amount of story and reflection and well-worked language, developing a fictional world that is voluptuous, mysterious, and poignant. Excepting the first-person narrator, who moves in and out of the story, Morrison devotes a single section to each character, writing each section in the limited third-person. And, in each, Morrison strides through the emotional and historical life of her character with remarkable insight and economy.

Reading this work stretched my emotions more than many books ten times the size ever did, and when I finished it, I turned back to the beginning and re-read the sections that bewildered me--especially the first. This time, I not only understood the narrative, I think that I grasped one of Morrison's observations: some stories are furious and wounded and beyond our reach without an overarching eye that only fiction can provide us.

Morrison is a writer who has that eye, and the words to describe what she has seen.(less)

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Feb 14, 2009 Marcy rated it 5 of 5 stars

There is no mercy when it comes to slavery, but there are mercies shown throughout the story, one by a mother who allowed her daughter to be sold to a white man she thought would to be kind to her daughter; She could not bear the thought of their own master having his way with her daughter, to break her daughter as she is coming of age like he did to her mother. Florens is taken across the ocean with her new master. Lina, another slave owned by Jacob, showed mercy in bringing up this child becau...more

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Nov 29, 2008 Eric rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book definitely builds for me but its not like Toni's other books where you just can't put it down. Even though the subject matter was weighty, it was a quiet Toni Morrison, at least for me. For a book that's only 167 pages, the dilemma wasn't crucial at first because you have to move around with a few different characters in a short period of time. With that said, the execution of how this all comes together was very gratifying at the end. I never felt I was in bad hands, or that it wasn't...more

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Nov 22, 2008 Allison rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Cindy Ross-Katz

NY Times is correct in comparing A Mercy to Morrison's previous renowned work, Beloved. Both deal with slave life: the backstories of slaves; the relationships between slaves and owners and mothers and daughters; the realities of being owned and being free in 17th century America. Like Beloved, A Mercy grapples with abandonment as its central theme.
However, A Mercy is a much more grounded novel than Beloved in that the reader is not guessing throughout the novel how much is real and how much is...more

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Nov 28, 2008 Karlan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult

This extraordinary short book is wonderfully written. The style changes from chapter to chapter as different characters narrate. Some puzzles are solved as one reads, but I wanted to reread the novel as soon as I finished it to better appreciate the intertwining elements. The tragedies of 17th century New England landowners, slaves, religious fanatics, servants in New England are told in a brutal yet poetic way.

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Dec 09, 2008 Yetunde rated it 2 of 5 stars

This was definitely not one of my favorites. I am usually a die-hard Morrison fan, but this one just wasn't up to par with her earlier works. Many people have compared this to Beloved, but I find that comparison unjust. This book, while it had its moments of brilliance, was inundated with dense, incomprehensible prose. At times, I was unable to decipher who was speaking and when. It just wasn't a good read for me.

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Oct 21, 2011 Mohammed rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: general-fiction, library-books

This is my first novel of this author and i was impressed by how she created a different language, voice for the different point of view characters. They all sounded like real women, men in US before there was US. She presented slavery in different forms and in a subtle way. It was not melodramatic as books about slavery in America can be. As a story the novel didnt grow, end as you expect but it seemed like telling a traditional story was not important to the author.

I liked reading about native...more

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Mar 24, 2009 Adele rated it 2 of 5 stars

Maybe I'm just not a Toni Morrison fan. Even though I want to be. This is only the second book of hers I've read, the first being Song of Soloman in high school. I mean, no question, the lady can write. Certain passages are just beautifully rendered.

A Mercy is told from several different points of view in pre-revolution colonial America. (It's the seventeenth century, and around Maryland, I think. Early enough that the Portuguese are still big shots in the area.) We begin with Jacob, a Dutch fa...more

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Apr 09, 2009 Laurel rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, historical-fiction

I really hate to only give 2 stars to a Toni Morrison book. My main problem with A Mercy (the audio version) was with the narration. Morrison chose to read the book herself, and I'm not sure how well it worked. She reads so slowly and pauses in the middle of sentences so often, it started to feel like an attempted poetry reading. For example, "Far away to the right (pause), beyond the iron fencings (pause), enclosing the property (pause) and softened by mist (pause), he saw Rosa Cortez, quiet (p...more

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Jan 01, 2009 Will Byrnes rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This is a devastating look not only at the slave experience in the 17th century, but of various forms of bondage and of the place of women in that world. While skin color may have defined one sort of servitude, gender and class define others. Yet there are some ways to find some space between the bars, some time outside.

Set in the late 17th century, this is an ensemble story. Florens is a young, spirited slave girl. She speaks in the first person giving us a look from inside her skin. Except fo...more This is a devastating look not only at the slave experience in the 17th century, but of various forms of bondage and of the place of women in that world. While skin color may have defined one sort of servitude, gender and class define others. Yet there are some ways to find some space between the bars, some time outside.

Set in the late 17th century, this is an ensemble story. Florens is a young, spirited slave girl. She speaks in the first person giving us a look from inside her skin. Except for one chapter by Florens’ mother, the rest of the book is third person. We see Florens’ experience with owners, families and yearnings old and new. Jakob is a kindly merchant/farmer, eager to help the unfortunate, always recalling his own humble, even desperate childhood. Rebekka is outwardly a free white woman, but truly was sold by her parents to be Jakob’s wife no less than any black slave. Lina is the eldest of three helper women on Jakob’s farm, a mother and friend to Rebekka. She is a Native American, a survivor of a small pox outbreak and the subsequent torching of her village. Sorrow is a black-toothed, somewhat addled woman who washed up on shore after a shipwreck. She holds conversations with an imaginary twin. Morrison also shows us two indentured servants. Despite having fixed terms to their indenture, their bosses find or concoct excuses to prolong their indebtedness and thus their servitude endlessly. (p 57 – the original seven years stretched to twenty-some, he said, and he had long ago forgotten most of the mischief that kept extending his bondage.) One cannot but think of today’s extension of tours of duty in the military.

Religion comes in for a beating here. (p 74 - Religion, as Rebekka experienced if from her mother, was a flame fueled by a wondrous hatred.) In one scene Florens is suspected by a bizarre woman of being a witch and is forced to strip so she can be checked to see if she has a tail. Later, she attaches herself to a free black man in another form of devotion, only to have that work out badly. Lina had been taken in by a group of fundamentalists, who, unkindly, named her Messalina, seeing her as cursed by God. A curate is guilty of buggering a young boy.

The 17th century is a cruel, harsh world (p75 – …it was clear in her household that execution was a festivity as exciting as a king’s parade. Brawls, knifings and kidnaps were so common in the city if her birth that the warnings of slaughter in a new, unseen world were like threats of bad weather) both in the old world and the new. Jakob offers a relatively safe place, a fenced-in peaceful community where orphans collect.

But with all the horror of the world, we still define for ourselves who we are, maybe by paring crusted misery from our memory, maybe from holding some part of our true self separate from the harsh world. (p 50 - Solitude, regret and fury would have broken her had she not erased those six years preceding the death of the world. The company of other children, industrious mothers in beautiful jewelry, the majestic plan of life: when to vacate, to harvest, to burn, to hunt; ceremonies of death, birth and worship. She stored and sorted what she dared to recall and eliminated the rest, an activity that shaped her inside and out. By the time Mistress came, her self-invention was almost perfected. Soon it was irresistible.)

While maybe not the masterpiece that Beloved was, A Mercy is a very dense novel, a torte of a work, covering a range of subjects rich in significance in language that is moving and penetrating.
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Dec 26, 2008 Map rated it 4 of 5 stars

What a sad, sad book, about the evils of slavery, religion, money. While it is written about an America of four centuries ago, A Mercy has resonance in these days of economic uncertainty, fundamentalism, and the false belief in unfettered "capitalism." As the author illuminates the terrible bonds between religion and slavery—of seeing others, whether native Americans, Africans, or poor whites as non humans worth less than livestock—I couldn't help but be reminded of the religious zealots who bel...more

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Feb 23, 2009 Alexis rated it 4 of 5 stars

I was so psyched to read this, like many a Morrison fan I am sure. I was a little disappointed by how short it was. I didn't know how she could possibly flesh out her characters well enough in 170-odd pages. And sure enough, they all remained a little sketchy.
I really love that she took on this interesting moment in the history of America, the early colonial settlers period. She gave herself the opportunity to write about African slaves, Brazilian slaves, indentured servants, Native Americans, p...more

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Mar 04, 2009 Jason rated it 5 of 5 stars

"poison is like the drowned, it always floats"...
consider this phrase from the novel and you will capture the primary emphasis of this book...

what i mean by this is captured in the figures of jacob and florens...figures which represent the full spectrum of the slave relationship...
with jacob, the slave owner, morrison depicts the notion that one cannot just sip lightly from a poisoned cup and avoid being poisoned...likewise one cannot merely dip one's toe into an economic system founded on slave...more

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Feb 16, 2009 Johnny rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical, female-protagonist, fiction

I'm sorry to Morrison and all her fans (and I am one), but I did not like this book! Admittedly, it had one strike against it in my view because of the setting; I hate anything set in excessively dirty times. I know that is totally something to explore in therapy, but it's the reason I don't like westerns and it's the reason I started out not liking this book, which is set in the seventeenth century. But beyond that, it just all seemed so heavy handed in it's attempts to be "literary." The chara...more

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Oct 04, 2011 kenny rated it 4 of 5 stars

i admit that i believe a bad morrison book is better than the best that most writers will ever get on paper. that being said, i found this slip of a book extraordinary. i don't know how her mind works, and i never will. i don't mind being confused at first, because i trust her enough to go with it, and am happy to follow along until i feel like i DO have some idea of what is going on, which is when i start over. i suppose the lack of linearity is a challenge that some find pretentious or simply...more

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Jan 25, 2009 Barbara rated it 5 of 5 stars

Oh, this book was so beautifully written!The chapters that alternate with the telling of the story are like poetry. Maybe it was that this week my husband went to a lecture on the underground railroad or maybe it was the inauguration of President Obama or the ghostly reminders of my growing up in era of the civil rights movement. This book smashed me in the heart.

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Nov 10, 2012 Leka rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: america, riletture

Anche. Ma non solo

Questo libro parla di donne. Ma non solo, anche di uomini.
Parla di libertà; non solo, anche di schiavitù.
Parla della vita, ma non solo, anche della morte.
Parla di madri, ma non solo, anche di figlie.
Parla di ciò che è giusto, ma anche di ciò che è
sbagliato.
Parla non solo di religioni, ma anche di fede.
Parla di un dono, sì, ma anche di un abbandono.

Io l'ho trovato bellissimo.
Mi sono addormentata tra queste pagine.
E una volta letta l'ultima riga dell'ultima pagina sono tornata...more

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Jan 13, 2009 Fatty added it

where is the potency? where is the imagination that builds a substantial thing of a devastating emotion (the ghost of Beloved, the ball of fuzz in Sula, the blue eyes of Peccola and her strange, desolate inward voices)? what is the mercy? at first i thought of the saying 'lord'a'mercy' in which the 'a' is a contraction of 'have', which would make the title a plea, an exhortation, but now i doubt. now i wonder if the mercy is the writing, is the graffiti on the walls of an empty room in a never-i...more

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About Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Anthony Wofford), is an American author, editor, and professor who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature for being an author "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."
Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed African American characters; among the best k...more

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“I dream a dream that dreams back at me” — 55 people liked it

“She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.” — 40 people liked it

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