books 2011 // # 20 - Mercy by Jodi Picoult
Title: Mercy
Author: Jodi Picoult (* 1966)
Publication Date: 1996.
Genre: General fiction. Chick-lit.
Page Count: 505.
Summary: What would you do for someone you love? Would you lie? Would you leave? Would you kill? When Jamie MacDonald arrives at the police station with the body of his wife and the confession that he killed her, he is placed under arrest, and a small Massachusetts town grapples with the questions raised by the act. Is it murder to kill a terminally ill person who begs you to do so? Mercy explores this highly charged emotional and ethical issue in a novel that is as haunting as it is beautiful. [Source].
Review in 5 words or less: Unrealistic, unlikable characters | one-sided and superficial treatment of the book's basic topic, euthanasia | Not worth reading IMO |
Personal Rating: ◊ of 5.
Review:
It seems as if Picoult's recipe for books is to take a controversial topic, euthanasia in this case, and wrap a story around it. Generally that's not a bad idea, but in Mercy at least I felt that the presentation of the topic was too superficial and one-sided.
I started out liking the set-up of the book with the depiction of small town life and its peculiar inhabitants. Unfortunately, then Mia makes her appearance with her outstanding flower-skills, her violet eyes and her amazing ability to hear when a flower opens its blossoms or hear blood rushing through veins from far off. In a word, that woman is highly unrealistic, too perfect for the world and utterly ridiculous. Too bad she's being taken seriously throughout the book.
As the story proceeds dear Mia turns into a regular stalker girl - but even then it's not depicted as a bad thing. Personally, even aside from the whole thing with the adultery, I find Mia's behavior morally highly questionable. Next to that Miss Perfect likes to carry her cat around in a closed backpack and yet claims to love animals.
Unfortunately I have to admit that I seldom picked up a book with such an amount of unlikable characters. Cam is an egotist, Mia psycho and Allie is just plain stupid.
The characters' motivation is sometimes hard to understand (i.e. all of a sudden Cam, who happily cheats on his wife, all of a sudden decides that he does love his wife and wants to stay with her, after all. He tells her he is going to love Mia forever but prefers to live with Allie and Allie, stupid, dumb character that she is - accepts it meekly). In fact a lot more time is wasted on the "love triangle" of Cam, Mia and Allie than on the actual story revolving around Jamie. Once Picoult finally does decide to address Jamie's situation and the general topic of euthanasia, the topic is treated very superficially and one-sided. In my opinion that's a great flaw of the book, because when a topic like euthanasia is addressed at all - and especially when it's supposed to build the core of a story - then it deserves to be treated a bit more in depth than what we get in this book. In Mercy there's only one way to look at Jamie's situation: it's romantic / he did it for love / everyone who is against Jamie is wrong (of course we get no clear reasons why it's wrong). Conveniently all those against Jamie either learn the error of their ways or are depicted as unpleasant and/or unattractive to make it easier for the reader to identify the "bad guys".
Overall the story is depressingly predictable, the characters remain flat and unrealistic and the whole book is just plain unbelievable and absolutely not to my taste. In my case it was a waste of time I only invested in, because I had to kill some spare hours and no other book on hand.
Links: official website, @ wikipedia
Other books I've read by this author: Vanishing Acts (2005).