A Mercy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article or section contains information regarding scheduled, forthcoming or expected future book(s). The content may change as the book release approaches and more information becomes available. |
 |
| A Mercy | |
| Author | Toni Morrison |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Knopf |
| Publication date | 2008 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 224 pp (Hardcover edition) |
| Preceded by | Love |
A Mercy is a 2008 novel by American author and Nobel Prize recipient Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison's 9th novel A Mercy (Knopf, November) reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter—a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
[edit] Plot summary
In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class division, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were carefully 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. Her slave mother has urged him to take her. This is Florens, “with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady,” who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives . . .
There are other voices: the native-American Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious persecution back in England; and young Sorrow, daughter of a sea captain, who’s spent too many years at sea to be quite . . . normal; and finally the devastating voice of Florens’s 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, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter—a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
Acts of mercy, like everything else, have unforeseen consequences.
[edit] Characters
[edit] External links
|
|||||||||||||||||
