A Mercy centers primarily on a young slave woman who was shown A Mercy in her youth, taken from a plantation to have a shot at life farther north. As the young woman, Florence, tells her story to her lover in her own voice, we get, interspersed, the stories of all the other people that work on the small farm, both their back stories and their thoughts and experiences through a co-developing narrative that centers around Florence leaving and returning to the farm. Bonds grow and strain and break and rearrange as this little community from all walks of life struggles to find it's way through life. There are no wicked people, or villains within the community, but the heartbreak of the novel is that even so, they struggle to do right by each other and hold together.

This was a difficult book to follow the first time through, as might be guessed from my description. The narrative changes perspective and time with very little auditory queue, just a brief pause. On the first time through I didn't catch it the first few times and was this deeply confused. It didn't help that one of the characters was named Sorrow, which I wasn't sure was a name at first (again, a downside to listening instead of reading). By the end though, I had a general sense of who was who, and when I actually listened to the whole book again (it's only 6 hours), and the full meaning was much more legible, and the pattern in perspective shifts and time jumps became easy to follow.

This book reminded me a lot of The Vaster Wilds in theme and mood, though it's personality was still quite it's own. Not a joyful book, but a fascinating one.