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Jan 26, 2016voisjoe1_0 rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
A Mercy is a short, but very complex novel. It deals with colonial America circa 1680-90 and includes a diverse variety of people. Included are Jacob Vaark (Sir), a farmer and perhaps a rum runner, his wife Rebekka (Mistress), a female Native American servant (Lina), a young female slave (Florens), a possibly indentured young female servant ( Sorrow), a freedman blacksmith, and two white indentured workers Scully and Willard. We begin to get the picture that colonial America is basically a land of a few rich white men who basically profit off the labor of indentured Whites and Black slaves – not quite the advanced Democracy as told in most U.S. History books. The structure of the novel, like other Morrison novels, is quite complex and as with most of her works, I had to restart after 50 pages once the construction of the chapters became more clear.