Book Blurb:
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.
My Review: 4 stars
Mercury by Amy Jo Burns is a story that shows the dysfunction of family in a pretty dysfunctional small town in Pennsylvania.
When Marley comes to town with her single mother, she is the one that sets the crux of the book in motion. Her power over the Joseph boys is remarkable and her maturity at this young age was immense. She seemed to be omnipresent at times because she got into all of the Joseph families heads.
The author’s strength is in her multi-layered character building. I felt like a knew each character quite well. I found the discord between Elise and Marley to be incredibly well written. They were the adage of: so close and yet so far.
Themes of mental illness, egotistical misogyny, sibling relationships, motherhood, and mystery were all woven through the storyline. Book clubs will get a good discussion out of this one.
Quotes I liked:
Sometimes a secret was all a woman had to call her own.”
“Men do things, and women apologize for them.”
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