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A Mercy

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Manufacturer: Knopf
List Price: $23.95
Our Price: $10.98
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Average Ratings:

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, 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.


DESCRIPTION:

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307264237
ISBN: 0307264238
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: 2008-11-11
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: 2008-11-11
Studio: Knopf


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• The White Tiger: A Novel (Man Booker Prize)
• 2666: A Novel
• The Hour I First Believed: A Novel
• Unaccustomed Earth: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)
• Netherland (Vintage Contemporaries)


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Customer Rating:
Summary: harrowing and beautiful and enraging and enlightening and heartbreaking
Comment: A Mercy is a story of slavery in colonial America - in all the ways people, black and white, women and men, can be owned and broken. I love Ms. Morrison's way of writing. She starts with some core mystery and then wraps it with concentric circles of narrative relayed by different characters, and in doing so, slowly reveals the heart of the mystery, all while setting the scene and telling a history with precise and gorgeous detail. A Mercy is no different, and no less harrowing and beautiful and enraging and enlightening and heartbreaking.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Consumers beware, your rights are being trampled upon
Comment: Shame on Toni Morrison for allowing the criminally crippling of text-to-speech on this work. A lost sale here.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Author & Publisher Need to Have "Mercy" on Blind Kindle Owners
Comment: Did the publisher actually ask the author's permission to not enable text-to-speech? Did this author knowingly sign a new contract that will prevent blind and disabled people from reading/listening/page turning this book? Why?
Sorry, but I cannot support this author or publisher by purchasing a disabled product.
Hopefully, the Text-to-Speech will be enabled soon, as Kindle owners who are blind or disabled cannot read this book. I enjoy the T2S on the Kindle as well and use it on the go when reading is not practical. I will gladly rewrite my review when the publisher enables the Text-to-Speech function on this book.

Customer Rating:
Summary: No Text to Speech, No Purchase!
Comment: This is one of the first backwards, greedy authors (and/or publisher) to ask that Amazon disable the Kindle 2 text to speech function for their book. This is a stupid move that is unfriendly to the visually impaired and to the consumer in general. I would urge people to boycott this book (or any other by this author) for that reason. I certainly will never buy any book by this author as long as this policy stands!

Customer Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautiful!!!!
Comment: I have personally responded to some of the negative commentators. I mentioned to them that I think we have read and/or listened to a different book. I have no idea what they are even talking about! To me this book is achingly beautiful and one of Toni Morrison's best. In a short book, she captures so much, because her words are so perfectly chosen and crafted, it is if she is "channeling" the characters. I do understand that if a reader does not like or "get" poetry they will not like this book. So I say to them, please don't read Toni Morrison. I am a writer, and I listened to the author's reading of her book with rapt and amazed attention. She is a genius, and I cannot believe how stunningly and powerfully she writes and also reads this work. This book is not just a Mercy, it is a masterpiece. Perhaps those who didn't like it have a problem with being reminded of the horrors of slavery, what was done to Native Americans, women, and poor people in the 1600s. Perhaps it makes them uncomfortable to have to admit that we are still living with the consequences of the cruelty that was done to so many in the past. For those that say, they are "tired" of these themes and they have been written about already, I remind them that many of the injustices told in this book still goes on in many places of the world, and we are still living in the US with that aftermath and scars. I recommend this book to you if you are a serious reader, love poetry, and yes,are a "liberal." If you don't like poetry, feel offended by people reminding us of our collective guilt, and can't hear the "mercy" in this story, you will hate it. Stay away, read something else. Don't denigrate an author who can write circles around you. (And me!!)

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