Toni Morrison
Hardcover | Pages: 167 pages Rating: 3.7 | 20049 Users | 2708 Reviews
Be Specific About Books Supposing A Mercy
| Original Title: | A Mercy |
| ISBN: | 0307264238 (ISBN13: 9780307264237) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | Orange Prize Nominee for Fiction Longlist (2009), James Tait Black Memorial Prize Nominee for Fiction (2008), The Rooster -- The Morning News Tournament of Books (2009) |
Commentary Conducive To Books A Mercy
In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark 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, 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, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.
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.
Point Regarding Books A Mercy
| Title | : | A Mercy |
| Author | : | Toni Morrison |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 167 pages |
| Published | : | November 11th 2008 by Knopf Publishing Group (first published 2008) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. Cultural. African American |
Rating Regarding Books A Mercy
Ratings: 3.7 From 20049 Users | 2708 ReviewsComment On Regarding Books A Mercy
This is a devastating look not only at the slave experience in the 17th century, but of various forms of bondage and of the place of women in that world. While skin color may have defined one sort of servitude, gender and class define others. Yet there are ways to find space between the bars. Toni Morrison - from The TelegraphSet in the late 17th century, this is an ensemble story. Florens is a young, spirited slave girl. She speaks in the first person giving us a look from inside her skin.I read this with my book club African American Historical Fiction. This is a very hard one to rate and review. I found this story to be dry, mundane, unfascinating, and probably lacking 100 or so pages. This story represented a time rarely discussed, the 1600s. Knowing that alone bored me before even opening the first page. I was extremely surprised to find that the characters in this story were extremely underdeveloped. Honestly I didn't care for or about any of them. But it's funny what
By the end of this novel I felt as though I had finished reading a collection of character sketches that could be used to form a much larger and perhaps more coherent text. Each chapter skips around from one character to another, and from first to third person narration, which in itself is not a problem, and if done well can make an interesting and eclectic whole. In this case, the text simply became frustrating; a puzzle that is frankly not interesting enough to put together. The characters in
I love Toni Morrison, the way she holds out the dark truths of Americas past and forces the reader to look and while the themes here are the same as much of her other work this one is a bit more raw, not the writing which is beautiful as always, but here she just lays it all out in plain sight, here it is motherfuckers, And oh man does she really give it to Christianity good for its part in the oppression of women, slave trade, all around evilness, etc, so you know I was into that and I probably
"poison is like the drowned, it always floats"...consider this phrase from the novel and you will capture the primary emphasis of this book...what i mean by this is captured in the figures of jacob and florens...figures which represent the full spectrum of the slave relationship...with jacob, the slave owner, morrison depicts the notion that one cannot just sip lightly from a poisoned cup and avoid being poisoned...likewise one cannot merely dip one's toe into an economic system founded on
i'm an unabashed fan of Toni Morrison. she puts the creative in creative writing. which means her style is not for everyone, but i have yet to read a book of hers i didn't love. This particular book hit home for me in a surprising way. Surprising, perhaps, because i started reading it without knowing what it was about. It seems it was about my ancestors...People who ended up in America in the 17th century for one reason or another and mixed together--Europeans of various origins, Natives, and
Yes, I am a Toni Morrison fan and believe she is incapable of writing a bad book, but that doesn't mean I wasn't ready to be critical of her new book if necessary. It's not necessary. The beginning may seem slow (that never bothers me) as we are thrust into a world that is faraway in time, but real. Historical details never bog down; they are worn lightly, as a reviewer put it.Reviewers have compared one character here to Sethe from Beloved; and though I see the parallel, this is a very
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