Regular marked price: $23.95Discount Price: $14.37
Cost Savings: $9.58 (40%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780307264237
ISBN number: 0307264238
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 176
Printing Date: November 11, 2008
Publishing house: Knopf
Release Date: November 11, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 37
Studio: Knopf
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
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, very 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.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
"A Mercy" is one of Toni Morrison's most accessible novels of late. In general, when an author is compared to Faulkner I run the other direction, but Morrison is the exception. The "Faulkner-essence" in "A Mercy" is mercifully minimal. Be not afraid.
In this novella, Morrison explores not just slavery, but also the experiences of Native Americans, indentured servants, and the ambivalence of early settlers who were not so keen on slavery...yet benefited from it nonetheless. It is also easy to read a strong anti-religion thread through this story. Neither Protestants nor Catholics escape condemnation, although Lina's made up Native American spirituality seems acceptable.
"A Mercy" was an enjoyable read, though it seemed truncated; I would have been happy to read much more about these characters.
Rated by buyers -
It's been a while since I've anticipated a book from an author as much as I have with Toni Morrison. I've enjoyed each and every book she has written. A Mercy, I must say, was a bit different than her other books on some levels, and on other levels it is the same writing that I have come to love from Morrison.
What is different is that she bases her novel in the seventeenth century wrapped around the historical context of a frontier setting in Virginia, the lives of woman, both free, indentured and slaves, not to mention the background of commerce and trade within the New World. Morrison does wonderfully in capturing the historic aspect of the times and yet not lose the reader. A historic novel with a current feel to it. One of my favorite chapters was a section of Rebekka's and her comparison of old England with the New World.
What really stands out though is Morrison's writing, which is exemplary as usual. Her style of writing is a recursive style, which always lends to a more complete and complex novel. As the storyline progresses each subsequent chapter switches to a different character, whose past is recounted until is rejoins the current storyline to advance it forward until the subsequent chapter, when it starts all over again. At very first you begin to see complete pictures of each character, but not for the book, until slowly Morrison gives birth to a complexly interwoven novel that drips sophistication and depth.
Each character, from Rebekka to Sorrow to Lina to Florins, are full and real, with good qualities and bad. Morrison doesn't paint one character better or worse than any other, just real. Rebekka, the lowly born in England sent to the New World to be a wife, Lina the Native American reformed and brought into the light of the Europes, Sorrow the born and raised shipmate, and Florins the slave child. They form a motley collection of women, yet a complex and very alive and colorful novel.
The only reason not a 5 star review is because A Mercy is certainly not her best novel and I have read better from her, namely Paradise, and know that she can and does write better. A definite recommend, both the book and the author.
4 stars.
Rated by buyers -
To read Toni Morrison is a privilege. To hear her narrate her work is both privilege and pleasure. Her voice will surprise some as it is slight with the smallest bit of huskiness. Such strong, wonderful words from a voice so quiet? At times the sound belies her 77 years; at other times, it reveals all of that time as she tells us a story of 17th century America, the years before slavery became what we know of it as today.
Set primarily in the home of farmer Jacob Vaark this is a mini masterpiece, the print copy running a brief 169 pages. His household is unique, a blend of the outcast and the wounded. There is his wife, Rebekka, who fled England to escape religious intolerance. Here her closest friend is Lina, a Native American servant who saw her village destroyed by disease. Sorrow is the oddest of the cast, a strange girl who was found much like a piece of drift fibre washed up by the sea.
Florens, the central character, is a young slave girl whom Vaark took in payment for a debt. After hearing her mother plead with Vaark to accept her she finds herself lost, searching for love.
A strange household? Yes. But each in quest of heart's fulfillment, as are we all.
Every listener will undoubtedly find something different in A Mercy - all will be sorry it is over so soon.
- Gail Cooke
Rated by buyers -
Newly released, A Mercy takes place in the 1680's - the early days of the slave trade in the Americas.
Jacob is a trader who takes a small slave girl- Florens - in partial payment for a debt. The mother of the child begs him to take the girl, not herself. It is this act that has consequences for all the lives that are intertwined with that of Florens'. Florens joins Jacob's wife Rebekka, Lina, a servant and Sorrow, an indentured young woman, at their hardscrabble farm. Scully and Willard are also hoping to buy their freedom. Florens yearns for the blacksmith, an African who has never been enslaved.
Life at this time in history is defined and described from the viewpoint of each of these characters. Each character is enslaved to something in this new world - an owner, religion, wealth, desire and memory. The most poignant voice is that of Floren's mother. The last chapter of the book belongs to her and it ends on a powerful note.
Toni Morrison has a gift with words. Although it is tempting to read straight through to the end, I always take the time to savour and enjoy the language she uses.
..."especially here where tobacco and slaves were married, each currency clutching it's partner's elbow".
Toni Morrison is an amazingly gifted writer, having won both a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize. If you haven't experienced her yet, I encourage you to pick up any of her books.
Rated by buyers -
Ms. Morrison's provocative new novel gleams with the wisdom of a masterful storyteller and moves just as smoothly. Alternating between a very first person and third person point of view, the voices that emerge and grasp the reader have a soothing quality to them and one will rightly follow them wherever they lead. As with any Morrison novel, there is, of course, confusion at first, and mystery, and intrigue. But if the reader is alert enough and willing enough to interact with the text, question it, dance with it, the connections start revealing themselves very first drop by drop, then in a torrent and the pleasures of the novel can't help but multiply...
Literacy seems to be an interesting theme in this novel (by which I mean being literate on many levels, not just on writing and reading, but there's that too): when Florens, the young heroine of the book, on the very first page writes to the man she loves and asks him if he can read, she is asking him not only if he can read the words she is writing to him, but also if he can read her. And he ultimately does (he reads her as "wilderness"). But the reader is also implicated in this question; it is as if the text, in a way, is asking the reader to read it beyond its words, beyond its telling. I am eagerly accepting this challenge but will you?
Find other books like this one:
