the miracle of mercy land book review
Sunday, October 31, 2010 • book review
Mercy Land has made some unexpected choices for a young woman in the 1930s. The sheltered daughter of a traveling preacher, she chooses to leave her rural community to move to nearby Bay City on the warm, gulf-waters of southern Alabama. There she finds a job at the local paper and spends seven years making herself indispensable to old Doc Philips, the publisher and editor. Then she gets a frantic call at dawn—it's the biggest news story of her life, and she can't print a word of it.
Doc has come into possession of a curious book that maps the lives of everyone in Bay City—decisions they've made in the past, and how those choices affect the future. Mercy and Doc are consumed by the mystery locked between the pages—Doc because he hopes to right a very old wrong, and Mercy because she wants to fulfill the book's strange purpose. But when a mysterious stranger shows up, Mercy begins to understand she may have to choose between love and loneliness . . . or good and evil . . . for the rest of her life.
RIVER JORDAN began her writing career as a playwright with the Loblolly Theatre group. She teaches and speaks nationwide on 'The Power of Story', is a monthly contributor to the southern authors' collective A Good Blog is Hard To Find, and produces and hosts the weekly radio program CLEARSTORY with River Jordan, in Nashville, where she and her husband live. She is the author of Saints in Limbo and this is her fourth novel.
This book was very interesting. It kept me turning pages and wanting to know what was going to happen next. The characters were somewhat one dimensional but the story kept me captivated. Although it was a story about something that could never plausibly happen, I was still drawn into the lives of Mercy and Doc. The historical setting of the book did not play a huge role in the story but made it more interesting than if those things would have happened in today's culture. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes a good story that isn't necessarily something that could happen in real life.