A Mercy

I read this on a suggestion of my great aunt who thinks I need to read more than science fiction and fiction. So I read this novel. It’s pretty short, I think around 100 pages or so.

Again, I’m not going to go much into plot. This book is written from at least six different perspectives. Normally this would not be an issue or particularly confusing if there was some decent chronological semblance to it all. The problem is that the perspectives tend to include a brief autobiography, a section that is most likely concurrent with the previous chapter, and then a section that may actually progress the story chronologically. This is probably more confusing than I was really signing up for because basically each chapter has a section that predates the preceding chapter, a section that is concurrent with the preceding chapter, and perhaps a section that progresses the story line beyond the preceding chapter. Granted not all books need to be linear but I would say in this case it was very jarring and not particularly well executed and therefore was less interesting and more distracting and detracting from the overall reading experience.

In conclusion if you want to read a book that involves the perspective of northerners in pre-revolutionary United States as well as their servants / slaves I suppose this is a good book but be prepared for a temporal dissonance induced headache.