Mercy
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult comes a “sensitive exploration of the balance of love” (Publishers Weekly).
Two cousins are driven to extremes by the power of love, as one helps his terminally ill wife commit suicide at her request, and the other becomes involved in a passionate affair with his wife’s new assistant. In the midst of betrayals and trials, forced to confront the limits of their love, these cousins must ask themselves how far the borders of their hearts can extend.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The idea of love turning someone crazy takes on a literal meaning in Jodi Picoult’s romantic mystery set in small-town Massachusetts. Chief of Police Cam MacDonald, the patriarch of a close-knit clan of Scottish immigrants, reluctantly prosecutes his cousin Jamie for mercy killing his terminally ill wife. At the same time, an alluring newcomer to the village disrupts Cam’s too-comfortable marriage to his florist wife, Allie. Picoult expertly navigates the gray area between right and wrong with empathy and respect for her characters and her readers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What could have been a competent, topical novel about a mercy killing becomes, in Picoult's (following Picture Perfect, 1995) hands, an inspired meditation on love. The setting is Wheelock, Mass., a slightly eccentric town where most of the residents are of Scottish descent, where weddings end in a blood vow, the name MacDonald is "painted on an alarming number of mailboxes" and police chief Cameron MacDonald doubles as clan chief and protector. On a seemingly ordinary day in Wheelock, Jamie MacDonald, a cousin of Cameron's, drives to the police station and announces: "My wife here, Maggie, is dead, and I'm the one who killed her." Cam finds himself saddled with a murder case and a conflict of interest: his cousin has given in to the pleas of his cancer-ravaged wife to kill her, and he's come to the clan chief to confess. But as police chief, Cam must also prosecute. On the same day, Cam's wife, Allie, the local florist, hires Mia, a violet-eyed beauty with a genius for flower arranging. Allie gets involved in Jamie's case, and Cam, who has spent his life in service to his community and his clan, falls in love with Mia and begins an affair that will bring his marriage to the breaking point and change it profoundly. Like Jamie, Allie is the marriage partner who loves more. "It's never fifty-fifty," says Jamie. As Jamie's court case proceeds, Picoult plumbs the emotional core of both marriages. The pace of the trial is slow, but Picoult pays loving attention to her central characters, fashioning a sensitive exploration of the balance of love.
Customer Reviews
I read exactly 58 pages and stopped to write this review
I don’t think I’ve ever written a review for a book I haven’t finished except in those cases where the book was so abysmally horrid I couldn’t finish it.
But in the sample there was a sentence that grabbed my heartstrings - the character described himself as seeing chain stretching across the Atlantic. I’m a genealogy buff, focused solely on the ancestry of my people. I too have chains, multiple links, stretching back past the civil war, the war of 1812 and the war that freed America from the tyranny of England. It in was that single sentence that I realizes Jodi Picoult had again reached into the mind of a reader. It’s like she knows me, my history and the 10 generations of family that have survived on American soil.
Sadly the story dragged on and on until it reached a very unsatisfactory conclusion which lacked closure.
Mercy
I've read most of Jodi Picoult's books and this was so so. It just didn't seem to connect or really pick up. I thought the story line was great it just literally dragged and I'm sorry but the ending was like "what really" that's it. I felt like it needed to be tied up better at the end. It was almost like the author was alike I'm done!!
Her worst book ever.
It was like pulling teeth getting through this one. Love all of her books but I feel like I wasted 14.99 on this one.