Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⬜
Title: Mercury
Author: Amy Jo Burns
Genre: Literary Fiction
Setting: Pennsylvania, USA
Month Read: January 2024
Book Type: E-Arc
Publication: January 2024
Publisher: Celadon Books
Pages: 336
*Thank you to Netgalley and Celadon Books for my E-Arc. All thoughts expressed are my own, and my arc did not influence my review at all.
TRIGGER WARNING-
Pregnancy / Abuse / Death / Alcoholism / Sexual Themes
"Men do things, and women apologize for them."
No Spoiler Summary (Goodreads):
It’s 1990 and seventeen-year-old Marley West is blazing into the river valley town of Mercury, Pennsylvania. A perpetual loner, she seeks a place at someone’s table and a family of her own. The first thing she sees when she arrives in town is three men standing on a rooftop. Their silhouettes blot out the sun.
The Joseph brothers become Marley’s whole world before she can blink. Soon, she is young wife to one, The One Who Got Away to another, and adopted mother to them all. As their own mother fades away and their roofing business crumbles under the weight of their unwieldy father’s inflated ego, Marley steps in to shepherd these unruly men. Years later, an eerie discovery in the church attic causes old wounds to resurface and suddenly the family’s survival hangs in the balance. With Marley as their light, the Joseph brothers must decide whether they can save the family they’ve always known―or whether together they can build something stronger in its place.
Review:
I was feeling a lot of FOMO not popping this book into my BOTM box and was SO hyped when someone in a group said it was a read now option on Netgalley. I immediately downloaded it and started right in and man, am I so glad I did. This book immediately sucked you in- the characters, the setting, the sweat, the stuffiness of the local church- you could immediately feel it all.
There is something about a suburban family novel that I gravitate towards, and devour, and Mercury is no exception. Amy Jo Burns wrote the perfect characters, who you love, and hate, and root for, and ultimately are disappointed, or scared for throughout the course of the book. You are physically on the field during the dry, dusty Pennsylvanian summer baseball games. You're in a hot church sweating as you get married. You are on top of a roof, in the middle of summer, drinking a bottle of lukewarm water. It's absolutely a beautiful novel, with a familiar setting, and even in some ways familiar characters.
Like our heroine of the novel, Marley, you're pretty instantly thrown into the family dynamic of the Josephs. Like many novels before, there is a bit of a love triangle, and I think everyone will have a favorite brother out of the three. You spend a lot of time hoping for better circumstances for everyone, and as a mother of boys, I really felt a weird kinship with the unlikable (most of the time) Mother Joseph. I really found her arc as one to stay away from in my own life, the men in my life cannot have every single part of me- and I think Marley ultimately makes similar decisions, but in a very different way. I don't want to give too much away, but the characters and their development in the novel are so wonderful, and you'll run a full range of emotions from the first page to the last.
Have you read Mercury yet? I'd love to chat if you have!
Recommendation:
1990s HISTORICAL FICTION:
Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas
Family Dramas
Marrying the Ketchups by Jennifer Close
We Are the Brennans by Tracey Lange
The Connellys of County Down by Tracey Lange
The Family by Naomi Krupitsky
Black Cake by Chermaine Wilkerson
Last Summer at the Golden Hotel by Elyssa Friedland
"Sometimes a secret was all a woman had to call her own."
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