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keeperofpages's review
3.0
Set against the backdrop of WWII, with themes of race, injustice and community, The Mercy Seat is an emotionally charged read. When I first started reading this novel, I was thrown by how quickly the perspectives changed, I wondered how I was ever going to settle into the novel, and get to know the characters, if I only heard from them for a few pages at a time. Little did I know just how powerful this snap shot narration would be. With a constant change of perspective every few pages, it was vital Winthrop was, not only able to convey the progression of this plot but also, able to convey the emotion of each character, and to my delight, this was achieved. The writing, at times, is so beautiful and thought-provoking. Not only does this novel shine a light on the prejudices rife in Louisiana in 1943, but it also raises questions on the use of the death penalty.
It isn’t obvious at first, but as the novel progresses, you see how each person’s perspective is connected and this brings the plot together nicely. You see those who are certain of Will’s guilt, and those believe in his innocent, those gearing up to watch the electrocution, and those who believe it’s wrong to sentence a man to death.
The strongest perspective in this novel, for me, came from Will’s father, Frank – you can just feel that Frank has had a hard life, a black man in Louisiana in 1943, knowing his son is due to die at midnight, trying his best to get back in time to see him one last time before it’s too late. I can’t even put into word how much I felt Frank’s narration in my heart.
There’s no denying this novel is, in places, exceptionally powerful, thought-provoking and heartfelt but…. of the nine perspectives, only two of them were black. A story of a possible wrongful conviction, wrought with racial tension, a black man is about to be electrocuted – a novel that promotes discussion on justice and race, you can’t help but see the imbalance in perspectives. Interestingly, Will’s narration didn’t feel at the centre of this plot. A young man alone in his cell waiting for death with nothing but acceptance to keep him company – acceptance that death is coming, yet, I never really felt like this novel was Will’s story. Now, it’s worth mentioning this is a white female author writing the perspective of a young black male facing the death penalty, so you have to allow for a bit of leeway in the narration; I can imagine Will’s, and Frank’s, perspectives were incredibly hard to write, and Winthrop did an amazing job writing them, Frank’s in particular. But, one has to wonder, this novel is about how a community reacts to a black man sentenced to death, why is it so heavily focused on how white people feel about this potential injustice? They’re not on the receiving end of this racial prejudice, yet their perspective on this racial prejudice is dominant….
The ending of this novel came as a real surprise, it’s an open ending, but a powerful one, one that leaves you questioning law and justice. To end the novel this way was a very clever move by Winthrop, because it ensure you stay thinking about it.
Overall, I do recommend this novel, it is highly heartfelt and very well-written. It is intentionally slow-paced, so you have time to process the emotions you’ll feel as you read it, I just wish the character creation was a little more diverse.
*My thanks to the publisher (Sceptre) for providing me with a copy of this book*
It isn’t obvious at first, but as the novel progresses, you see how each person’s perspective is connected and this brings the plot together nicely. You see those who are certain of Will’s guilt, and those believe in his innocent, those gearing up to watch the electrocution, and those who believe it’s wrong to sentence a man to death.
The strongest perspective in this novel, for me, came from Will’s father, Frank – you can just feel that Frank has had a hard life, a black man in Louisiana in 1943, knowing his son is due to die at midnight, trying his best to get back in time to see him one last time before it’s too late. I can’t even put into word how much I felt Frank’s narration in my heart.
There’s no denying this novel is, in places, exceptionally powerful, thought-provoking and heartfelt but…. of the nine perspectives, only two of them were black. A story of a possible wrongful conviction, wrought with racial tension, a black man is about to be electrocuted – a novel that promotes discussion on justice and race, you can’t help but see the imbalance in perspectives. Interestingly, Will’s narration didn’t feel at the centre of this plot. A young man alone in his cell waiting for death with nothing but acceptance to keep him company – acceptance that death is coming, yet, I never really felt like this novel was Will’s story. Now, it’s worth mentioning this is a white female author writing the perspective of a young black male facing the death penalty, so you have to allow for a bit of leeway in the narration; I can imagine Will’s, and Frank’s, perspectives were incredibly hard to write, and Winthrop did an amazing job writing them, Frank’s in particular. But, one has to wonder, this novel is about how a community reacts to a black man sentenced to death, why is it so heavily focused on how white people feel about this potential injustice? They’re not on the receiving end of this racial prejudice, yet their perspective on this racial prejudice is dominant….
The ending of this novel came as a real surprise, it’s an open ending, but a powerful one, one that leaves you questioning law and justice. To end the novel this way was a very clever move by Winthrop, because it ensure you stay thinking about it.
Overall, I do recommend this novel, it is highly heartfelt and very well-written. It is intentionally slow-paced, so you have time to process the emotions you’ll feel as you read it, I just wish the character creation was a little more diverse.
*My thanks to the publisher (Sceptre) for providing me with a copy of this book*
readbymegs's review
dark
emotional
sad
fast-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death
Moderate: Racism and Sexual assault
milkamilka's review
2.0
Something between 2 and 3 stars. The writing is beautiful but for a story taking place around the upcoming execution of a Black man this book is extremely focused on the thoughts and feelings of white people which is not what I expected. Should have done more research before purchasing this book.
midnightbookgirl's review
5.0
This is a very emotional book that focuses on racism, the KKK, the death penalty and the deep flaws of our legal system. The writing is beautiful, the characters rough and real, and it's a very different look of life in 1940s America than the usual WW2 hero epic. But when Frank refers to his son as a casualty of the war, he is right is so many ways. Definitely recommending this one.Not an easy read, emotionally, but all more reason to read it.
expendablemudge's review
5.0
TODAY 19 AUGUST 2020 $2.99 on Kindle!
The beautiful writing! The moving story! The unbearable whiteness of the novel's voices, however, don't lead to celebration.
There are many third-person cinematic, or subjective, points of view. That gives us a kaleidoscope view of a day in the life of a bog-standard racist Louisiana burg in the waning days of Jim Crow. The entire story, the trial for rape of a Black young man, his conviction and sentencing to death, and remand into local custody the night before his judicial murder, takes place before we join the proceedings.
I read the story with great reluctance after a bookish-social-media friend damn near blew her brains out warbling its virtues. I can honestly say, Kickass Katie, you've never steered me less wrong than with this wonderful, tight, dense tale of a day in the life of a dead man and those who killed him. The factual inspirations for the work, detailed in the Afterword, are so grim as to make me want to bury myself in something soft so as to absorb the blows the mere idea of them give my already-battered psyche.
But in fiction's no-less-brutal embrace, the violation doesn't stop: As I read this book, I was bashed and struck and shoved into realizing this is a similar, though not identical, set-up to the also nonfictonally inspired 1981 novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez. I'll assume that most people who read my blog are familiar with, at the least, the story of the incredibly wonderfully named Santiago (patron saint of Spain, country eternally "reconquering" itself from the Muslims) Nasar (as in Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt)'s murder at the hands of his ex-girlfriend and lover, Angela Vicario's, twin brothers. Both are stories of sex "crimes" that are, in fact, the crimes of women who love too freely for the comfort of the men around them. Who exactly asked them, I don't know; but they certainly receive a lot of cultural support for their rage and hate of the men who "defiled" the women in question. WHo were, let us note, both in love with the defilers....
Well, such was and is the lot of Woman in a world defined by and run by and for men. It revolts and disgusts me. It twists every act into something pointed and edged with noxious bigotry and unforgiving judgment. It demands lies to sustain itself, and the lies are to self and others in equally toxic and ruinous measure. Willie remembers his time with Grace as love; Grace, whose death was ruled a suicide, isn't there to tell us what she felt and no one, evidently, thought to ask. It is Grace's father who brings this nightmare into being. He, like the Vicario twins in García Márquez's story, decides that his daughter's sexual indiscretion must be punished, and raises the hue and cry against the "perpetrator" Willie. She must've been raped! No good white woman would open her legs to a Black man voluntarily!
Hogwash.
And Grace, poor lamb, pays the ultimate price for her "crime" as she dies of a gunshot wound to the head. We're given no information about that, it is announced as a fait accompli, and no investigation or even questioning of it occurs. I question it. I suspect Grace's father, faced with a daughter who would defile herself by offering her body to a Black man (yes, yes, the N-Word is used throughout the book, but I am not so constituted as to be able to use it myself), couldn't live with her and couldn't allow her to live. He is the epitome of the man I loathe and despise the most: The zealot. He resorts to the foulest, most evil-souled means to enforce his will for the world onto all others. Never mind what they think, feel, want. He Knows Best and you, scum, exist to obey him.
So here is Willie, doomed by the State to die. We spend some time with Willie on this, his last day of life. But he's not a memorable character. He's a kid, a boy in love for the first time (never stated but feels so implicit that I assume it's true), and barely aware of life before and after his flare-up of primal passion. Memories come to him, simple things like frost and a brother's love; but in the end, they are nothing compared to the fact that Grace, the reason he existed so hard if so briefly, is dead. He ponders what a normal boy does:
Try as he might, this guff makes no headway against the rushing river of regret that Grace is dead, Grace is dead, he killed her, Grace is dead. And so he, the victim of appalling and malevolent men's rage, does nothing to fight the horror of his impending judicial murder:
Willie is not the first man to be killed by his regrets.
And the state whose judgment will kill him at midnight, served by the local District Attorney? What does the state have to say for itself? Nothing, really; the DA's participation in the judicial murder of a boy whose only crime was falling in love was not easy or uncomplicated.
He and his Massachusetts Yankee wife were set at odds by this execution's run-up, and on this day, they both are doing their best to be fully present with each other. They are not succeeding:
Each in their own way made a hell of this moment by living it again and again and each has left the other behind in search of meaning outside their pair bond. A wife and mother, a woman, thinks of her son as the center of her existence; her son's father demanded this boy be murdered by the state. The husband and father can't force himself to contemplate the reason he did this thing that so troubles himself and his wife. And they each remain unaware of the other's cause of turmoil, assigning it to things that make sense to them but, in all honesty, wouldn't to the other.
The ending is so wrenching, so extreme, so deeply fitting, that I can't bear to take away your unmediated reaction to it. Suffice to say that it, too, is based on fact. The parts invented to make the story work as fiction are pitch-perfect enhancements of the facts.
There are other stories told here, not at all lower in emotional resonance than the main one; but they are, of necessity, less urgent: A wife's long-brewing loathing of a once-loved husband; a man's reckoning with the universality of fatherhood; a father's wretchedness and loss and dignity; a religious man's struggles against demons his god has no way to defeat but whose reality is tragically evident; a gormless man-boy without his own place in the world whose effort to carve one has dire consequences. All weave a beautiful basket to carry the main story in; others could easily see them as the main story in and of themselves. I won't say they're wrong. I will say that, in light of the polyphonic choices made by the author, the many stories are well-chosen and work together to make a syncretic whole.
There has to be a bruise, or it's not an apple: What the hell is the DA's dying mother doing here? Nothing at all. She's used as somewhat mawkish window-dressing for a sentimental moment or two. The story's momentum and depth would not change were she to be cut entirely.
At long last, I'll get to the point: Go get this book, and I swear it won't be wasted time to read it.
The beautiful writing! The moving story! The unbearable whiteness of the novel's voices, however, don't lead to celebration.
There are many third-person cinematic, or subjective, points of view. That gives us a kaleidoscope view of a day in the life of a bog-standard racist Louisiana burg in the waning days of Jim Crow. The entire story, the trial for rape of a Black young man, his conviction and sentencing to death, and remand into local custody the night before his judicial murder, takes place before we join the proceedings.
I read the story with great reluctance after a bookish-social-media friend damn near blew her brains out warbling its virtues. I can honestly say, Kickass Katie, you've never steered me less wrong than with this wonderful, tight, dense tale of a day in the life of a dead man and those who killed him. The factual inspirations for the work, detailed in the Afterword, are so grim as to make me want to bury myself in something soft so as to absorb the blows the mere idea of them give my already-battered psyche.
But in fiction's no-less-brutal embrace, the violation doesn't stop: As I read this book, I was bashed and struck and shoved into realizing this is a similar, though not identical, set-up to the also nonfictonally inspired 1981 novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez. I'll assume that most people who read my blog are familiar with, at the least, the story of the incredibly wonderfully named Santiago (patron saint of Spain, country eternally "reconquering" itself from the Muslims) Nasar (as in Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt)'s murder at the hands of his ex-girlfriend and lover, Angela Vicario's, twin brothers. Both are stories of sex "crimes" that are, in fact, the crimes of women who love too freely for the comfort of the men around them. Who exactly asked them, I don't know; but they certainly receive a lot of cultural support for their rage and hate of the men who "defiled" the women in question. WHo were, let us note, both in love with the defilers....
Well, such was and is the lot of Woman in a world defined by and run by and for men. It revolts and disgusts me. It twists every act into something pointed and edged with noxious bigotry and unforgiving judgment. It demands lies to sustain itself, and the lies are to self and others in equally toxic and ruinous measure. Willie remembers his time with Grace as love; Grace, whose death was ruled a suicide, isn't there to tell us what she felt and no one, evidently, thought to ask. It is Grace's father who brings this nightmare into being. He, like the Vicario twins in García Márquez's story, decides that his daughter's sexual indiscretion must be punished, and raises the hue and cry against the "perpetrator" Willie. She must've been raped! No good white woman would open her legs to a Black man voluntarily!
Hogwash.
And Grace, poor lamb, pays the ultimate price for her "crime" as she dies of a gunshot wound to the head. We're given no information about that, it is announced as a fait accompli, and no investigation or even questioning of it occurs. I question it. I suspect Grace's father, faced with a daughter who would defile herself by offering her body to a Black man (yes, yes, the N-Word is used throughout the book, but I am not so constituted as to be able to use it myself), couldn't live with her and couldn't allow her to live. He is the epitome of the man I loathe and despise the most: The zealot. He resorts to the foulest, most evil-souled means to enforce his will for the world onto all others. Never mind what they think, feel, want. He Knows Best and you, scum, exist to obey him.
So here is Willie, doomed by the State to die. We spend some time with Willie on this, his last day of life. But he's not a memorable character. He's a kid, a boy in love for the first time (never stated but feels so implicit that I assume it's true), and barely aware of life before and after his flare-up of primal passion. Memories come to him, simple things like frost and a brother's love; but in the end, they are nothing compared to the fact that Grace, the reason he existed so hard if so briefly, is dead. He ponders what a normal boy does:
...the stuff in the Bible he doesn’t believe, though he’s tried—he’s read the Bible, he’s prayed, he’s gone through all the Christian motions, hoping to believe. Wanting to believe. He figures it would make this whole thing easier if he did, but he can find no comfort in religion, in the book his mother lives by.
–and–
...{Willie} stays where he is, watching his white breath curl away and slowly mingle with the world’s cold air, watching himself breathe for the first time.
Try as he might, this guff makes no headway against the rushing river of regret that Grace is dead, Grace is dead, he killed her, Grace is dead. And so he, the victim of appalling and malevolent men's rage, does nothing to fight the horror of his impending judicial murder:
And when these visions come, it is all Willie can do not to beat his head against the concrete walls of his cell, his soul aching with regret; he ran away. He’d have never let it happen if he’d stayed.
Willie is not the first man to be killed by his regrets.
And the state whose judgment will kill him at midnight, served by the local District Attorney? What does the state have to say for itself? Nothing, really; the DA's participation in the judicial murder of a boy whose only crime was falling in love was not easy or uncomplicated.
If he’s read it once, he’s read it a thousand times, the warrant he chased after, sentencing Willie Jones to a current of electricity of sufficient intensity to cause death, and the application and continuance of such current through the body of the said Willie Jones until said Willie Jones is dead.
He and his Massachusetts Yankee wife were set at odds by this execution's run-up, and on this day, they both are doing their best to be fully present with each other. They are not succeeding:
...he wonders which is worse, to be lynched or to be shocked to death in an electric chair. There was a time when he was sure there was difference, but now that he’s had a hand in it, he wonders if it really matters in the end what kind of justice it is—mob or legal—when the end result is death.
–and–
“I suppose I care for many things, but what I live for is my boy.” (spoken by the wife)
Each in their own way made a hell of this moment by living it again and again and each has left the other behind in search of meaning outside their pair bond. A wife and mother, a woman, thinks of her son as the center of her existence; her son's father demanded this boy be murdered by the state. The husband and father can't force himself to contemplate the reason he did this thing that so troubles himself and his wife. And they each remain unaware of the other's cause of turmoil, assigning it to things that make sense to them but, in all honesty, wouldn't to the other.
The ending is so wrenching, so extreme, so deeply fitting, that I can't bear to take away your unmediated reaction to it. Suffice to say that it, too, is based on fact. The parts invented to make the story work as fiction are pitch-perfect enhancements of the facts.
There are other stories told here, not at all lower in emotional resonance than the main one; but they are, of necessity, less urgent: A wife's long-brewing loathing of a once-loved husband; a man's reckoning with the universality of fatherhood; a father's wretchedness and loss and dignity; a religious man's struggles against demons his god has no way to defeat but whose reality is tragically evident; a gormless man-boy without his own place in the world whose effort to carve one has dire consequences. All weave a beautiful basket to carry the main story in; others could easily see them as the main story in and of themselves. I won't say they're wrong. I will say that, in light of the polyphonic choices made by the author, the many stories are well-chosen and work together to make a syncretic whole.
There has to be a bruise, or it's not an apple: What the hell is the DA's dying mother doing here? Nothing at all. She's used as somewhat mawkish window-dressing for a sentimental moment or two. The story's momentum and depth would not change were she to be cut entirely.
At long last, I'll get to the point: Go get this book, and I swear it won't be wasted time to read it.
susannam's review
4.0
With short chapters (generally 2-4 pages), each focused on one of several characters, this book could have seemed fragmented, but the gentleness and quietness with which Elizabeth Winthrop builds this multi-dimensional view of the scheduled execution of a young man is quite beautiful and haunting. The story is based on actual events and the circumstances are heart-sickening, but the nuances of the characters allow you in, and even allow you some comfort, even as you are mourning the damage, both direct and indirect, to everyone portrayed. Sometimes I begin a book like this with some dread, afraid that it will be just too depressing, but I found so much light here.
relytolley's review
3.0
Received uncorrected proof from the publisher in exchange for a review.
Set in Louisiana during WWII this novel is a sort of 'day in the life' of an ensemble of characters who deal with personal woes as well as larger issues like poverty, racism, justice, and the war. There are at least 8-12 characters, young and old, rich and poor, female and male, black and white, peppering the book. It takes place within a twenty-four hour period wherein an 18-year old black man, Willie, will be executed in the electric chair for the rape of a white girl, Grace. Great writing. Great storytelling. Characters were average. Or maybe not; connecting with this story and the characters was difficult because the chapters were brief. I felt like I never engaged with them because as soon as I'd grow accustomed to their voice and story, it ended and we were on to someone else. Quite disconcerting to me.
Set in Louisiana during WWII this novel is a sort of 'day in the life' of an ensemble of characters who deal with personal woes as well as larger issues like poverty, racism, justice, and the war. There are at least 8-12 characters, young and old, rich and poor, female and male, black and white, peppering the book. It takes place within a twenty-four hour period wherein an 18-year old black man, Willie, will be executed in the electric chair for the rape of a white girl, Grace. Great writing. Great storytelling. Characters were average. Or maybe not; connecting with this story and the characters was difficult because the chapters were brief. I felt like I never engaged with them because as soon as I'd grow accustomed to their voice and story, it ended and we were on to someone else. Quite disconcerting to me.
beatrixminkov's review
4.0
Louisiana 1943. De 18-jarige Willie Jones is ter dood veroordeeld en wacht in zijn cel op zijn executie. Zijn vader Frank, probeert met zijn muilezel de grafsteen van Willie bijtijds op de begraafplaats te krijgen. Ondertussen heeft een andere gevangene onder leiding van een bewaker de opdracht gekregen om de elektrische stoel te bezorgen, is een echtpaar binnen de stad bezig hun eigen verdriet te boven te komen en overdenkt de officier van justitie het vonnis wat hij heeft geëist.
De genadestoel volgt al deze personages in de vooravond van de executie en brengt de pijnpunten van verdeeldheid, vooroordelen en moraal aan het licht.
De genadestoel volgt al deze personages in de vooravond van de executie en brengt de pijnpunten van verdeeldheid, vooroordelen en moraal aan het licht.
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