Title: The Unraveling of Mercy Louis Author: Keija Parssinen
Published: March 10, 2015
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 336
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:In Port Sabine, the air is thick with oil, superstition reigns, and dreams hang on making a winning play. All eyes are on Mercy Louis, the star of the championship girls’ basketball team. Mercy seems destined for greatness, but the road out of town is riddled with obstacles. There is her grandmother Evelia, a strict evangelical who has visions of an imminent Rapture and sees herself as the keeper of Mercy’s virtue. And then there are the cryptic letters from Charmaine, the mother who abandoned Mercy at birth.
At the periphery of Mercy’s world floats team manager Illa Stark, a lonely wallflower. Like the rest of the town, Illa is spellbound by Mercy’s beauty and talent, but a note discovered in a gym locker reveals that Mercy’s life may not be as perfect as it appears.
The last day of school brings the disturbing find, and as summer unfolds and the police investigate, every girl becomes a suspect. At the opening game of the season, Mercy collapses—and Evelia prophesies that she is only the first to fall. Soon other girls are afflicted by the same mysterious condition, sending the town into a tailspin and bringing Illa and Mercy together in an unexpected way.
It begins with a baby in a dumpster. What follows is a spellbinding exploration of the patriarchy at work and how a town can turn against itself, tearing down the children it’s supposed to protect in its search for “justice”. The Unraveling of Mercy Louis is a suspenseful, brutal coming of age story, one that author Keija Parssinen executes with sharp skill.
This is the kind of book that creeps up on its readers—aside from the eventful prologue, the author sets the scene amid the lazy, sweltering Texas summer, and rather than moving into a murder investigation, allows those opening images to rankle and fester. We meet Mercy Louis , her Holly Rolling grandmother, and the people of Port Sabine. As the novel progresses, a growing sense of dread and urgency builds up, and the plot gains momentum, careening towards climax. The Unraveling of Mercy Louis is a sneaky book; I didn’t expect to be sucked in the way I was, and this became a one-sitting read, uncomfortable and unputdownable.
The jacket copy of the book describes Port Sabine’s mentality as a “witch hunt”, and it’s entirely accurate. Once the medical examiner rules the baby’s death a homicide, and once the police pinpoint the high school, literally every teenage girl in town becomes a suspect. Hysteria descends, as does panic. Fingers are pointed and secrets revealed, and it becomes every girl for herself. As Parssinen comments, it soon becomes a crime in Port Sabine just to be a girl.
So much of The Unraveling of Mercy Louis revolves around girls and the way society approaches them and their sexuality, and the author’s sharp takedown of the patriarchy is breathtaking.
Here we have a town so enraged they’re roaming the streets, ready to assault and batter anyone the police take in for questioning—never mind that the mother of this baby is probably terrified, probably alone, and probably in a difficult situation. Here we have girls being told they’re worthless if they have sex before marriage, who are forced to wear special clothes like a scarlet letter if they break their Purity Covenant, so everyone knows they’re trash. Here we have a young woman blamed for her rape and then forced to carry the baby to term and marry her rapist. Here we have girls so desperate to keep themselves away from blame, they turn on each other just to protect themselves.
This is the world of Port Sabine, the terrain Mercy Louis has to navigate and somehow grow up in. This is patriarchy and religious fanaticism at work, and Parssinen lays it out for readers in unsettling, stark clarity.
Of course, though the murdered baby is always present in the story, sometimes it only lurks on the sidelines. Much of the novel is about basketball and new love and old friends and family secrets. At its heart, The Unraveling of Mercy Louis is a coming of age novel, but the darkness of the town’s obsession with “purity” is always just beneath the surface.
It wan’t until I finished that I realized how brilliant this book is, how skillfully Keija Parssinen put everything together, from the very beginning. The Unraveling of Mercy Louis is an immersive, humid read. Completely addictive and with startlingly astute social commentary, this novel impressed me very much.
