Fiction Review: Mercy Street

I have been a fan of author Jennifer Hay for many years. I read the Baker Towers novel in the early 2000s, which was set in Cole, Pennsylvania in the 1940s, and I really liked it. I wondered if it was the “right time and place” situation, but a few years later I enjoyed re-reading it for a group of my books. In fact, it is enough to make the list of the top ten favorite novels of 2009! Then I read the lady . Kimble , another novel by Hey, about three different women, each married to a man, and I love this woman, too. In 2011 I read A Family Status with a Genetic Daughter for a group in my Hague book and the following year I read Faith , which happened during the Boston Parish book scandal. . So when I first saw Jennifer Hey publish a new novel on February 1st, I took the opportunity to see it. I've heard of Mercy Street on tape and found it as interesting and suspenseful as any O novel.

Mercy Street is a multi-service women's hospital in Boston, and the novel tells the story of several different characters whose lives intersect at different points, many of which relate to hospitals. Claudia is a woman in her forties and works as a specialist in the clinic. He grew up in poverty in the village of Maine, the only child of a mother who, like Claudia, lived in a trailer with dozens of foster children. Although her mother did two jobs, Claudia was the main caregiver of most of the children, even though she was very young. His experience has enabled him to understand the lives of many poor young clients. Anthony grew up in Boston and was injured as a young man while working on a construction site. Unable to deal with the ongoing traumatic brain injury, he lived in his mother’s basement. She spent all of her time attending a daily meeting at a nearby Catholic church and engaging in her anti-abortion efforts, which included protests on Mercy Street. Timmy grew up with Anthony and knew him since childhood. She now weeds herself and her son in Florida. Claudia and Anthony are both Timmy's clients and one day they meet at his apartment. Victor lives in a village in Pennsylvania, he is a racist and extremist and collects guns and food. His views on abortion were very different from Anthony's: he believed that women of color reproduced faster than whites, so any white woman who had an abortion should be ashamed and condemned. He met Anthony online and asked him to create a website with a "Hall of Shame" featuring pictures of women visiting health clinics on Mercy Street (although many women were there for other reasons). Anthony is involved for moral reasons, but Victor is clearly dangerous.

The novel tells each of these characters separately, in separate sections, because their lives subconsciously overlap and influence each other. I’ve thought a lot about why I liked Hay’s novels so much and what made them so interesting. Like The Streets of Mercy , he writes more about ordinary people living ordinary lives, but he is an incredibly talented writer in bringing these characters to life on the pages. At the end of the novel, you are very interested in Claudia, Anthony and Timmy (maybe not Victor!) And want to know what happened to them. Each of these characters is a lonely person, so this novel doesn’t focus on the same family as many previous novels, but you can learn about their family history and (limited) existing relationships through flashbacks and current stories. Hey writes from a variety of perspectives, giving readers an overview of her life, motivation and values. The audio book was read by a narrator but it worked well and I was deeply immersed in the story. Of course, like Iman , the novel is controversial, but it’s not about questions, it’s about people. This makes The Hague's novels easier to read and more interesting, I think: for those who feel completely real on the pages.

352 pages, echo

Harper Audio

You can watch / listen to an interview with Jennifer Haye about Mercy Street , written by Jess Walter and hosted by Parnassus Books (owned by Ann Pachett). He talks about the concept of the novel, the cover and how to get acquainted with the class topics of the novel.

This book is suitable for the following reading purposes :

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Listen to an audio sample of the beginning of the novel and part of Claudia here and / or download it from Audible.

 

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