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A review by bunnieslikediamonds
The Unraveling of Mercy Louis by Keija Parssinen
4.0
Great writing, fully realized characters and complex relationships make this one of the best novels I've read this year. This is as much a coming-of-age tale as it is a literary thriller. The starting point of the story is a crime, but the focus is Mercy Louis, high school basketball star in a small town in Texas. Raised by a savagely religious grandmother, she is cripplingly innocent and inadequately equipped to handle normal teen stuff, not to mention letters from her absent drug addict mother. Add to this a dead fetus found in a dumpster and strange affliction that grips the town's teenage girls, and you have a whole town in a state of feverish anxiety (yes, there are some similarities with Megan Abbott's The Fever).
I sometimes feel a little detached when reading novels about experiences radically unlike my own. People talking about rapture and purity balls in all seriousness is completely alien to me, but Parssinen creates such a believable context for it that I became wholly immersed in the story. The misogony and religious superstition is dark and disturbing, all the more so because it is mostly perceived as entirely normal by the characters, but there is enough human kindness for a happy ending to seem plausible.
I sometimes feel a little detached when reading novels about experiences radically unlike my own. People talking about rapture and purity balls in all seriousness is completely alien to me, but Parssinen creates such a believable context for it that I became wholly immersed in the story. The misogony and religious superstition is dark and disturbing, all the more so because it is mostly perceived as entirely normal by the characters, but there is enough human kindness for a happy ending to seem plausible.