You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.67 AVERAGE
3.67 AVERAGE
I ripped through this book in two days, captivated by the small, creepy, entirely believable world of Port Sabine created by Keija Parssinen. From the first few pages I felt a stake in what would happen to Mercy Louis, the basketball playing teenage girl whose God-fearing grandma protects her from the larger world, and the inevitable clashes as Mercy yearns for those things - love, affection, respect - she senses her grandmother is also preventing from reaching her. Every character is unique, fully realized, and plays a part in Mercy's journey, from the bullying mayoral candidate to the quiet team manager who feels more comfortable seeing life through a camera viewfinder. Totally enjoyed this and now I have to go back and read her Parssinen's first book!
The kind of thriller you hope will be imaginative and suspenseful and dramatic but isn't. Instead it gives you a whole bunch of petty high school drama and an inexplicable and never-solved mystery. Next.
Easily one of my favorite reads of 2017 thus far. The tension in the small town of Port Sabine is evident from the first pace, and in the slow heat of a Texas summer, with mysteries and secrets simmering just below the surface of each character, that tension winds tighter and tighter as Mercy Lewis, Port Sabine's goldenchild, begins to unravel. With the notable exception of Mercy's love interest, who seemed a little "too good to be true" for me, each character was a complicated and beautifully drawn.
Parssinen's writing is highly literary, which sometimes feels like a real rarity in young adult fiction, but also incorporates elements of suspense, romance, stories of friendship, family issues, religion, and issues of class, race, and sexism without ever coming close to being an "issues" novel. Excellent.
Parssinen's writing is highly literary, which sometimes feels like a real rarity in young adult fiction, but also incorporates elements of suspense, romance, stories of friendship, family issues, religion, and issues of class, race, and sexism without ever coming close to being an "issues" novel. Excellent.
I had a hard time getting into the book as it was hard to find any connection between the two main characters. Although dated in 1999, it is still disturbingly accurate about the small town mob mentality and the pressures of being a teenage girl.
On the last day of school in 1999 Port Sabine, a fetal corpse is found in a dumpster near the high school. The discovery rocks the deeply religious oil refinery town, and every female student is viewed with suspicion. One of the girls embroiled in this mystery is Mercy Louis. A basketball star with stunning good looks and a virtuous reputation, she is the town’s golden girl. But behind her luminous exterior lurks a difficult personal life. After being abandoned by her mother, Charmaine, who is widely viewed as a junkie and a slut, she has been raised by her strict evangelical grandmother, who is desperate to keep Mercy from following in Charmaine’s footsteps.
Amid the witch hunt for Baby Doe’s mother, Mercy must deal with cryptic letters from the mother she has never met; a rift with her rebellious best friend, Annie; the overwhelming expectations of her grandmother and her coach; and a boy, Travis, who shakes the foundation of her beliefs. And at the periphery of everything is Illa Stark, the basketball team’s manager. A lonely wallflower who was forced to grow up too fast when a refinery explosion rendered her mother unable to walk, she is captivated by Mercy’s grace and talent.
After a life-altering summer, the tension culminates on the opening night of the basketball season, when Mercy collapses on the court and begins to display strange symptoms that the doctor can’t explain. Soon, other girls develop the same mysterious affliction, and panic spreads through the community.
The Unraveling of Mercy Louis by Keija Parssinen packs quite a punch. Although I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I picked it up, it has become one of my favorite books of the year, so far. Here are five reasons why I loved it and want everyone to read it.
1. Deeply religious Southern oil refinery town. Port Sabine, a Southern Texas town near the Louisiana border is portrayed vividly, with its conservative values and fraught relationship with the refinery that both provides the town’s lifeblood and causes serious health issues for its workers.
2. Criticism of the patriarchy. As you might expect from such a conservative Southern religious community, the people of Port Sabine are not the most progressive when it comes to how they treat their women and girls. This novel is a biting indictment of the attitude that a girl's virtue is her most valuable asset.
3. Fantastic coming of age story. Being 17 is hard no matter what your personal circumstances are. But add an absent mother who finally wants contact, a grandmother who is more focused on the Rapture (Y2K fear, y’all!) than loving you, a first love that challenges everything you have been taught, a judgmental community, and the unique stress small-town athletic champions face, and you have a real doozy of a coming-of-age story.
4. Dual perspectives. The story is told from alternating perspectives. In addition to Mercy’s first-person narration, we also get third-person chapters from Illa’s perspective as she deals with taking care of her house-bound mother, pursues a photography competition, and keeps tabs of Mercy. Although she has taken a back seat in many discussions of this book, she is a really wonderful, fully realized character.
5. Notes of other fantastic books and movies. Like The Fever by Megan Abbott, this book has a mysterious condition that sweeps through a group of girls. And its portrayal of the challenges facing girls growing up in Southern towns reminded me of Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. Finally, its takedown of slut-shaming called Mean Girls to mind.
I really loved The Unraveling of Mercy Louis and would highly recommend it to readers who love Southern coming-of-age stories with a touch of feminism.
See the original review on Books Speak Volumes.
Amid the witch hunt for Baby Doe’s mother, Mercy must deal with cryptic letters from the mother she has never met; a rift with her rebellious best friend, Annie; the overwhelming expectations of her grandmother and her coach; and a boy, Travis, who shakes the foundation of her beliefs. And at the periphery of everything is Illa Stark, the basketball team’s manager. A lonely wallflower who was forced to grow up too fast when a refinery explosion rendered her mother unable to walk, she is captivated by Mercy’s grace and talent.
After a life-altering summer, the tension culminates on the opening night of the basketball season, when Mercy collapses on the court and begins to display strange symptoms that the doctor can’t explain. Soon, other girls develop the same mysterious affliction, and panic spreads through the community.
The Unraveling of Mercy Louis by Keija Parssinen packs quite a punch. Although I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I picked it up, it has become one of my favorite books of the year, so far. Here are five reasons why I loved it and want everyone to read it.
1. Deeply religious Southern oil refinery town. Port Sabine, a Southern Texas town near the Louisiana border is portrayed vividly, with its conservative values and fraught relationship with the refinery that both provides the town’s lifeblood and causes serious health issues for its workers.
2. Criticism of the patriarchy. As you might expect from such a conservative Southern religious community, the people of Port Sabine are not the most progressive when it comes to how they treat their women and girls. This novel is a biting indictment of the attitude that a girl's virtue is her most valuable asset.
3. Fantastic coming of age story. Being 17 is hard no matter what your personal circumstances are. But add an absent mother who finally wants contact, a grandmother who is more focused on the Rapture (Y2K fear, y’all!) than loving you, a first love that challenges everything you have been taught, a judgmental community, and the unique stress small-town athletic champions face, and you have a real doozy of a coming-of-age story.
4. Dual perspectives. The story is told from alternating perspectives. In addition to Mercy’s first-person narration, we also get third-person chapters from Illa’s perspective as she deals with taking care of her house-bound mother, pursues a photography competition, and keeps tabs of Mercy. Although she has taken a back seat in many discussions of this book, she is a really wonderful, fully realized character.
5. Notes of other fantastic books and movies. Like The Fever by Megan Abbott, this book has a mysterious condition that sweeps through a group of girls. And its portrayal of the challenges facing girls growing up in Southern towns reminded me of Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. Finally, its takedown of slut-shaming called Mean Girls to mind.
I really loved The Unraveling of Mercy Louis and would highly recommend it to readers who love Southern coming-of-age stories with a touch of feminism.
See the original review on Books Speak Volumes.
I really enjoyed reading this, even though it felt very different than the strengths of Parsinnen's previous novel. Where that one was assured and delivered its thrills and character notes in a deliberate way, this one feels much more ragged, even if in a good way.
So the plot takes a long time to get going-- whether the plot concerns the fetus in the Market Basket dumpster or Mercy's twitching arm. And neither plotline quite resolves itself in a satisfying way (I get the parellels to The Crucible, but in that case, there was something that was pointed at-- here, I'm not sure that, I don't know what you'd call it, fear of young women's sexuality? is crisp enough to be the motive force for what happens to Mercy and the town). But the characters feel real and interesting, and a lot of the writing about the landscape, especially, but also about basketball, is quite nice, even if it's hard to believe it belongs to Mercy or Illa, our two focalizers. As a portrait, it felt fundamentally true, even when it might not be realistic.
The ending, well, I don't know-- here was where the book maybe dipped into being a bit of a YA novel, instead of a novel with young adult protagonists. The dividing up of good and bad people sort of flattened a lot of what I liked about other parts of the book. I recognize the desire to leave your characters in good places rather than bad, or worse yet, a lukewarm limbo. And I don't even mean that the ending, especially for Mercy, didn't feel earned. It just didn't feel satisfying, as rich as what came before it.
Still, a good read with lots to think and talk about going on between its covers.
So the plot takes a long time to get going-- whether the plot concerns the fetus in the Market Basket dumpster or Mercy's twitching arm. And neither plotline quite resolves itself in a satisfying way (I get the parellels to The Crucible, but in that case, there was something that was pointed at-- here, I'm not sure that, I don't know what you'd call it, fear of young women's sexuality? is crisp enough to be the motive force for what happens to Mercy and the town). But the characters feel real and interesting, and a lot of the writing about the landscape, especially, but also about basketball, is quite nice, even if it's hard to believe it belongs to Mercy or Illa, our two focalizers. As a portrait, it felt fundamentally true, even when it might not be realistic.
The ending, well, I don't know-- here was where the book maybe dipped into being a bit of a YA novel, instead of a novel with young adult protagonists. The dividing up of good and bad people sort of flattened a lot of what I liked about other parts of the book. I recognize the desire to leave your characters in good places rather than bad, or worse yet, a lukewarm limbo. And I don't even mean that the ending, especially for Mercy, didn't feel earned. It just didn't feel satisfying, as rich as what came before it.
Still, a good read with lots to think and talk about going on between its covers.
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Enjoyable but a little slow paced at times for me. I was initially hooked by the reliability to small town Texas and the religious fervor that often accompanies them, but there is so much more to the story. It delves into the lives of young women and what it's like when unexpected things happen in a tiny, very religious community. The ending left some questions to be answered but overall I think it's left to the reader to decide and sometimes I enjoy that.