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A mercy / Toni Morrison.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Morrison, Toni, 1931-2019, author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- African American girls--Fiction.
- African American girls.
- Interracial adoption.
- African Americans--Fiction.
- African Americans.
- Interracial adoption--Fiction.
- Racism--Fiction.
- Racism.
- Slavery--Fiction.
- Slavery.
- Prejudices--Fiction.
- Prejudices.
- United States--History--Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775--Fiction.
- United States.
- History.
- Genre:
- Fiction.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (195 pages.)
- Edition:
- First Vintage International edition.
- Place of Publication:
- New York : Vintage International, Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 2009.
- [Place of publication not identified] : [publisher not identified], [2008]
- System Details:
- text file
- Summary:
- A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier. In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in flesh, he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady. Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved. There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens' mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness. A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment. Acts of mercy may have unforeseen consequences.
- Notes:
- Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI Available via World Wide Web.
- New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year, 2008
- Description based on print version record.
- Local Notes:
- Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the John Louis Haney Fund.
- ISBN:
- 9780307270443
- 0307270440
- Publisher Number:
- 99986017463
- Access Restriction:
- Restricted for use by site license.
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