Mercury

Hope Larson’s Mercury is a really enjoyable teen graphic novel. It is set in a small town in Nova Scotia, and switches back and forth between the year 1859 and the year 2009, showing the separate lives of two related girls, Josey and Tara. In 1859, history is being created with Josey’s family, and in 2009, Tara is discovering the mysteries of her heritage. What really happened at her now burnt down house, all those generations ago?
This is a wonderfully realistic story with a bit of magic thrown in. I loved how the background colour of the pages changed if it was in 1859 or 2009, black or white. The drawings were big and wonderful and the entire book is very visually appealing.
I thoroughly enjoyed this graphic novel. Being Canadian, show more I got super excited at the references to Canadian culture (Yay, Tim Horton’s cup!). It was wonderful to see the connections between Josey’s and Tara’s separate lives, and how your decisions affect the lives of your family 150 years later. It’s nice to see a romance die and another bloom in the same story. Tara’s life and thoughts in 2009, especially, were so truly how teenagers are and think; the realism in that aspect really stood out to me. Mercury is a lovely magical tale of relationships, connections and promise. show less

Really nice art. This is the second book I've read by Larson (not counting her adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time) and I don't connect to her storytelling very well. Her plotting and pacing always feel a little off-kilter, her characters slightly opaque. She's a clever and thoughtful writer, just not my thing.

One thing I really appreciate about Maritimers is that they take you to their place and show you around. Like, there's this endless vista of North American sameness, and it doesn't matter whether your story's set in Texas or Vancouver or Ontario or Anytown USA, and while there are dispensations for prestige locations--New York, California--and for some of the obvious irreducibles--Quebec, the North--overall it gets me down how little time we, and our artists, spend inhabiting and thinking about the particularities of the places we're in. Cosmopolitan globalism is old news, but after a while it just gets old--something my roommate Derek and I talk a lot about in the context of academic careers, where everybody's jetting off to show more Philadelphia and Oslo and ruining the icecaps in order to swan around in person and peacock their chosen exotic field of endeavour--alveolar allophones in Pirahã? Indian diasporic literatures in South Africa, Southeast Asia and Fiji? Suntan management? Cocktailonomics?


Phew, I've got this big cosmopolomonkey on my back, evidently. Sorry. Anyway, nobody cares about knowing where they're from. I care a little, hence the ranting and the devotion to wool sweaters and Docs and beards and that whole aesthetic (really needs a better name than "Vanshitty"). but I'm not gonna start using words like "skookum". Whereas in Larson's charming stories, a nineteenth-century Gothic romance and a twenty-first-century teen romp, everybody calls kilometres "kims" and greets each other in Gaelic and talks about the "Sight" and it feels so real and friendly and just like every other Maritimer you ever meet and talk to. A low-profile, economically depressed, yet beautiful and fascinating and warm part of the globe, I ween, and I'd really like to visit and talk about all the places I've gone and be a West Coast snotbag. I think they'd roll their eyes, but forgive.


The art is generic in a Jen Van Meter sort of mould, but there is much spot-on dialogue, and the teenagery stuff takes me back like not much else. It's hard to write smart kids. And then at the end it gets all magically real and you're like "totally", because who knows what wonders lurk and delights creep in Acadie's haunted coves, and because you just really like everybody in this book and the Victorian storyline has already come to grief, so the law demands a happy ending in the present day. Come home from Fort McMurray, mum! show less

This is a strange story. Not bad-strange, just different, and it's really nice to read something completely different. I like the juxtaposition of historical Nova Scotia and modern day, the threads of gold through both narratives, the small and strange powers. It's a pretty dark tale, though, with no definitive answers in the end, and in that it is true to many family histories.

This is great - sophisticated story-telling, good characters, nice atmosphere. There should be hundreds or thousands more comics this good - this should be the mainstream. That said, its worth noting that it is a YA book, and the characters are mostly teens - people who are allergic to that kind of thing may want to steer clear. But if they do, they're missing a very fine comic, streets ahead of most 'mature' comics currently out there. If I had one slight criticism it's that some of the characters can look a touch too similar (although the characters that are meant to look alike I had no trouble telling apart, despite their similarity). Otherwise, this is excellent stuff.

Mercury is a moody YA book that mixes history, romance, family secrets, and magical realism, Mercury tells the parallel stories of two teenage girls in Nova Scotia, one in the 1850s and one in the present. Josey Fraser, the girl in the past, falls in love with a mysterious stranger who has found gold on her dad’s property, but her premonitions of tragedy soon come true. Tara Fraser, one of Josey’s descendants, is a runner who finds a mysterious locket and unravels her family’s history, while also falling for a boy at school. The story is starkly drawn in black and white, and I loved the near-wordless climax that involves a man-faced crow and a contracting spiral pit with hundreds of snakes.

The drawing is so expressive...I think that's one of the aspects I liked most about this novel. Larson's expert illustrations really allowed me to connect with the characters and I happily rooted for Josey and Tara. I became so attached to the characters that I was quite sad when the book ended...I wanted to know more about what happened to these two young girls.

There's an element of ghosts or spirits in the book and mystical occurrences which I always find to be lots of fun. I also loved the interplay between the past and the present. The author flipped back and forth between the two stories very frequently, which normally annoys me, but worked perfectly for this book. Overall, I'd recommend this to those who like graphic novels, show more elements of the supernatural, and historical fiction - a quick fun read! show less