This is a spare novel (less than 200 pages) set when American slavery was in its infancy. It's a tragedy about mothers and daughters, the powerful and the powerless, the gut-wrenching horror of slavery, the twists and turn of fate and the ways we humans can find and bestow tenderness amidst it all. ( )

The blurb from the publisher:

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.

The Short of It:

Read by the author, this is a mesmerizing story of love, betrayal and pain.

The Rest of It:

I've read a few of Morrison's books and I always have trouble with them. For me, the words lack a certain rhythm and I find myself re-reading pages that I've just read. I never understood the draw. That said, my book group chose A Mercy for October's discussion and I was sort of dreading it and looking forward to it at the same time.

For one, it's been years since I've read one of her books. Perhaps I've grown as a reader. Perhaps my experience this time will be different. I promptly went out and got the book, read a chapter or two and then stopped. Nope, still the same. Still haltingly strange for me. So then I ordered the book on audio. It's read by Toni Morrison and I figured that if it didn't strike a chord with me, and she was reading it as it was meant to be heard, then I would give up on Morrison altogether.

I'm happy to report that I loved it! Morrison's voice is melodic at times but definitely has a certain cadence to it. That haltingly strange way of speaking that I mentioned in the book form, is present in her speech patterns, but hearing her voice brought it all together for me. I then went back to the book and had no problems reading it. Have you ever done that?

After smoothing all this out, I settled into the story and found it to be haunting at times, yet the strength of these women amazed me. There is a wonderful interview with the author at the end of the audio book which should not be missed. Now that I've had this experience, I plan to re-read some of her other books.

Have you ever had a hard time reading a famous author and then wondered what all the fuss was about? Have you ever resorted to the audio book to see if it was different in some way? ( )

This novel begins with a slave girl, Florens, travelling on foot through the forest in search of the blacksmith, a man both foreign to her and entrancing because he is a black but has never been enslaved. Her mistress is ill, and she is calling on him to heal her. The story quickly expands to include other characters, each one allowed a voice and the time to be heard regardless of the book’s small size. Morrison is terse and epigrammatical; I think I got as much from what was left out as from what was included.

As the characters are introduced, the story unfolds. It is the 1690s in America, and Jacob Vaark reluctantly agreed to take Florens as a partial payment from a debtor. Back at home, Jacob already has a full plate. His wife, Rebekka, has recently lost her only surviving child. Lina, a Native American woman whose tribe was annihilated by small pox, is their dedicated servant. Another girl, the strange Sorrow who grew up on a ship, was taken in by the Vaark’s as well. In addition, two slaves from a nearby farm also help the family and their servants.

To me the most compelling aspect of this novel was the unobtrusiveness of the history. Morrison is able to weave history into the story in such a way that the reader must decipher it to coax its full implications and its legacy. History is handed to you on a plate that you must dissect with your hands rather than being spoon-fed. While she imparts the inherent contradictions and suffering that comes with racism pushed to its most evil conclusions, aspects of love, belonging, and self-worth are revealed. There is no over-explaining here. As the novel progresses, each character finds their own mercy in their own way. Whether this mercy is right or wrong is open to interpretation and largely based on historicism.

As ever Toni Morrison chops backwards and forwards in time and swaps narrative voice so that you can not allow your concentration to waver if you are to enjoy her writing to the full. It is a luxury you should find time for. Morrison's prose is lush and consuming, her portrayal of place and time rich and satisfying. If I had a criticism (and who am I to criticize writing of this stature?) it is that I would love to read Morrison some other subject. I would love her to extend her fictional range a little. She is too good a writer to have only written about the experience of (black African women) in slavery however important and significant it is for her to have written all her dazzling and affecting novels. ( )

Morrison paints a vivid picture of her characters in this brief lyrical narrative. The theme that most emerges for me in this novel of slavery in 1690s America is one of violence, of physical beatings from all sorts of unexpected places, in addition to the kind of gruesomeness that one would expect in this setting. Women beat each other, a slave girl, enamored of a free man, beats his child. Though unexpected, these acts in are not inexplicable. Morrison conveys an empathy for each character's point of view and does so with a sparseness of words, a poetic concision that sketches the essence of everyone very quickly and has them come together, intertwined despite disparate backgrounds and circumstances. It is only in the final chapter that the title is explained, as the main character's mother explains her motivation in having asked that her daughter be taken from her -- it would characterize a mercy to send her off with a man who seemed to see her as the human child she was rather than as a vessel in which to enact perverse desire. Vulnerabilities, strife, motivation, connections, needs, all are exposed to make a little sense of the apparently incomprehensible acts of so many of the characters. ( )