A Mercy

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - In "one of Morrison's most haunting works" (New York Times) the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the story of a mother and a daughter--a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.

Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 08/11/2009
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.46lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.20w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780307276766

Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 6.1
Point Value: 7
Interest Level: Upper Grade
Quiz #/Name: 128034 / Mercy


Review Citation(s):
People Weekly 08/10/2009 pg. 49
Commonweal 06/18/2010 pg. 28

About the Author

Toni Morrison is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.