Toni Morrison's "A Mercy" is a short yet intense novel. It was not an 'easy read' for me. Morrison's prose is, at times, beautifully poetic, at other times, the oblique language seems needlessly overstated.

I agree with what reviewer – Gwendolyn Dawson says on her blog Literary License: ‘A Mercy is stylistically and structurally interesting but the overall effect is a bit academic and sterile. Critics will like this book but readers may be disappointed by its inscrutability, which sometimes appears to elevate form over function.’

This novel is written through different voices and each chapter, layered, without warning or notation switches between first and third-person perspectives and at times it was difficult to discern which voice was speaking. Jacob and Rebekka, the sadly childless European landowners; Florens, who was sold away from her mother to repay a debt; Lina is the sole survivor of a small-pox outbreak in her village and Sorrow a poor black girl who has been raped and abused and daughter of a sea captain killed in a storm off the coast of the Carolinas; Willard and Scully, the white indentured servants; and the blacksmith, a nameless free African who captured Florens' heart. I give Morrison credit for her ability to craft these different personalities and weave them together is extraordinary.

Overall, I wouldn't say I enjoyed this book, but I would definitely say it is a uniquely told story with themes of racism, slavery, adventure, religion, and witchcraft. I found it hard to follow, my mind wondering to all of the other books on my shelf I would rather be reading. But her novels take some work to decipher, and I didn’t want to give up so easily. I found that I wanted to work at understanding her characters and their circumstances. It's the kind of novel that needs to be re-read and reflected upon, preferably a book discussion would help as well. ( )

"You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain." p 3

Florens is a slave, given away by her owner to pay a debt to one, Jacob Vaark, landowner. She's brought to his plot and works off the land along with several other women of varied backgrounds. Rebekkah, Jacob's wife who "shat among strangers for six weeks to get to this land"; Lina, a native whose tribe was killed by disease; and Sorrow who never has much to say, having been rescued from a shipwreck against her will. While trying to survive, Florens finds love and loss, with the women of Vaark's land having to fend for themselves.

Morrison conveys the reality of a virgin landscape, offering a brief glimpse of a land still wild, the harsh realities of digging out a life in the 1600s. Her writing, almost more like poetry in this work, has a fluid rolling quality that softly tickles the mind with description and dialogue. Her artistry is evident in that she writes in several voices, all with their own rhythms and cadences. These voices are more often than not dwarfed by the landscape though this is perhaps fitting. Back then the land was as much a threat to survival as was bad weather and illness.

One problem with the book is the beginning. An unknown speaker confesses to an act of violence. The form and meaning of this convoluted explanation only become clear towards the end of the book. A reader shouldn't have to struggle that hard just to get into a book. It was a bold move on Morrison's part, trying the intelligence of readers but in the end, fails to pull the reader in.

"a mercy" is an interesting glimpse into the world of slavery in the 1600s. Morrison paints a stark picture about the fragility of survival and the delicate nature of the human heart. ( )

Florens is a young slavegirl in 1690's Virginia, sent by her ailing Mistress to find a young African blacksmith who cured another slavegirl of the pox. As she sets out on the difficult journey, her thoughts flow toward the blacksmith chronicling the hardships she faces to reach him: losing her Master's shoes, finding temporary shelter with religious zealots who take her for a demon, the cold nights, the possibility of capture as a runaway slave, the visions of her mother. She also recites her love for him, as a kind of mantra to keep her sane, to keep her going until she reaches him.

Interspersed throughout her story, sixth other characters offer glimpses into Florens' life and into the New World: Jacob Vaark, a Dutch landowner who reluctantly accepts Florens in exchange for a debt owed by a Spaniard; Lina, the Native American woman who serves as Mistress' confidant and is in love with Florens; Sorrow, a slavegirl, possibly the only survivor of a shipwreck, who is still haunted by the passengers and her Twin; Rebekka Vaark, a strong woman whose spiritual beliefs are put to the test when she contracts the pox; Scully, an indentured slave who provides a remarkably clear view of each character in the novel; and finally Florens' mother who commits the ultimate sacrifice unbeknownst to her little girl.

Each narrator suffers through some form of test, ultimately showing the resiliency of human nature. But how will Florens handle such tasks when she confronts them?

Something I noticed is that each character sees the others at face value, but when given their chance to speak, what's seen on the outside doesn't necessarily reflect the true person, and with many surprises, I delighted in how each character shattered those pre-conceived notions. And, as an added "family" bonus, two of the characters also out themselves: Lina's affection for Florens is very quiet and secretive, but her jealousy flares at the first sight of the blacksmith; Scully, who openly confesses that he is attracted to men. To me, this also goes along with shattering the preconceptions because when discussing books or stories about slavery or the early days of the New World, sexuality almost seems a taboo subject, though it played a large role in how society operated at the time. (And still does.)

A beautiful book, filled with many surprises and twists. And though it's only the second of Morrison's novels that I've read, this one adds her to my list of favorite authors. ( )

After struggling through the first five pages of Toni Morrison's newest book, "A Mercy," I was faced with a decision: Should I continue to slog forward in the hope that it would all eventually make sense, or cut my losses and immediately toss the book into the return bin at my local library (there was, after all, a waiting list)? I have been burned by Ms. Morrison before. An octogenarian friend of mine presented me with a copy of "Beloved" several years ago. He plopped the recently purchased book into my lap and said, "I'm damned if I know what this woman is talking about. See if you can decode it, and call me later." I attributed his confusion to the effects of advancing age and attacked the book with confidence, only to find it as exhaustingly opaque as he had. I gave up after about one hundred pages.

"A Mercy" is a short book - about 170 compact pages, and I decided to stay the course. I'm glad I did. Ms. Morrison's language shifts from an elliptical stream-of-consciousness exercise in the first chapter to an intelligible and poetic narrative that sweeps the reader into the beauty and tragedy of 17th century America before it was America. Her ensuing prose combines a mystical, dreamlike quality with a razor sharp conveyance of nature's immediacy. Morrison leads her reader into a world that is at once mythic and yet acutely real, a literary version of Bierstadt's wilderness paintings.

The quest for belonging, the desire to forge a circle of interconnection between human and human, is a central theme of the book. Almost everyone is an orphan of some sort. Jacob Vaark has scraped his fortune together in the New World by employing the energy and wiles that enabled him to survive as a solitary street urchin in Europe. His wife, Rebekka, was shipped across the ocean to Jacob, sight unseen, by her father, who was only too glad to reduce his familial burden by one hungry 16-year old. Lina, Rebekka's Native American housemaid and farmworker, has lost her entire village to smallpox. Sorrow, an African orphan, has been taken in by Vaark after her rescue, half drowned, from a nearby river estuary. Florens, the main character of the story, has found her way into Vaark's household by default, having been accepted by Vaarck as "payment" for a Virginia slave trader's debt, but only after Floren's mother (the originally intended "payment") begged him to do so.

The motherless, disconnected state of Morrison's characters is made more poignant by the boundless wilderness that they inhabit. Breathtaking, seemingly endless, impersonal in its beauty and in its cruelty, the New World itself is a character in the book. Awe inspiring and yet merciless, nature has a leveling effect on social stratification when survival is at stake. Smallpox, malnutrition, an unfortunate fall that breaks a leg -- such misfortunes are no respecter of class or legal status. People live or die as a group, and the women on Vaark's failing farm form a friendship of sorts as they realize that coordinated effort from dawn until dusk is necessary in order to prevent nature from reclaiming their fragile foothold on the land.

Lina, Sorrow, and Florens, however, are fully aware that their cobbled-together coexistence is no substitute for social equality and the right to seek and maintain the bonds of family, a goal that each of them hungers for in her own way. The story has twists and turns that I won't reveal here, but it is safe to say that slavery's devastating effects on the human psyche run through the book and Vaarck's wilderness like a tainted river. The hopelessness and humiliation that accompany Floren's loss of control over her own body and destiny are tragedies that are compounded by her unconscious internalization of slavery itself. A free black ironworker rebuffs Florens' advances with a stinging rebuke: he wants her to go because she is a slave. When Florens responds, as if slapped, "What is your meaning? I am a slave because Sir trades for me," he replies: "No. You have become one. . . Your head is empty and your body is wild . . . Own yourself, woman, and leave us be."

Each side of the ornate iron gate that Jacob has commissioned the black journeyman to fashion for Jacob's newly completed mansion is topped by the image of a writhing serpent. When closed, the two serpent heads merge to form a flower blossom. Is nature the serpent that must be tamed in Vaarck's garden, or is man the serpent in the New World's Eden? Morrison invites you ponder this and other questions as you immerse yourself in this satisfying 2-night read. ( )

This is a wonderful book. The story seems to disappear at the end but everything up to that is simply a work of art. The shift between characters demonstrates that varied perspectives of a society in transition. This period in American history is intriguing as the traditional notions of American identity were yet to be fully formed. ( )