Customer Reviews

The Book of Mercy

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Kathleen Cambor has produced a first novel of astonishing depth, feeling and insight. This is a story that draws the reader inexorably but gently into the lives of a father, daughter, and son, all coming to understand with the passage of time what they have lost -- and struggling to find a way to reclaim it.

What they have lost seems to be love and direction. They feel it at first as an empty ache within themselves, and their paths to understanding it are varied. Their pain -- as a family and as individuals growing into their lives apart -- is conveyed very skillfully by Cambor's writing abilities. Her characters are alive -- they each have the usual complement of good and bad attributes. As their joys and sorrows are placed before us, we can feel them as well -- and we care about them, for they could easily be any one of us.

As one of the main characters, Anne, works diligently toward finding her place in life -- becoming, eventually, a psychiatrist -- she discovers at one point how important it is to listen to her patients. It would seem to be an obvious point, but it is one that so many people today take for granted or ignore. The key to any successful relationship -- familial, romantic, professional -- is communication. It opens the door to understanding, to respect, to caring, to humanity itself. Each of the family members -- and some of the other characters as well -- comes to this revelation in their own way and in their own time. Some of them hit upon it in time to change their lives for the better, some do not. Some wounds that heal also leave scars.

There are many emotions at play in this novel -- but Cambor never allows it to be carried by emotions alone. She utilizes a twin narrator technique to good advantage and effect. Portions of the story are told from the point of view of the father, Edmund Mueller, a retired firefighter struggling to find meaning in his life, battling the nagging question in his later years of what he could have done to hold his family together. Other parts are told by his daughter Anne -- the love for her family that she tries to suppress, then reclaim; her own search for meaning and fulfillment in her life. Her brother Paul, a missionary serving in far-flung third-world cultures, has his own internal battles to fight.

Cambor handles all of these characters and points of view with respect and ease -- the novel is intelligently constructed and written, enlightening as well as entertaining. This is one of the best books I've read this year.

I thoroughly enjoyed the character of Edmund Mueller. The author portrays well his slow descent from a man with purpose to a man without a rudder. A wonderful story of redemption and a family coming together again

I really enjoyed this book. The characters are all deeply interwoven and quite developed and it was a fascinating read. I definitely recommend it.

The set up for this novel is interesting, if a bit easy to anticipate in the first half. The father: stoic and crushed by his love for a flighty, mentally ill woman. The mother: beautiful, ravaged by her own mental sickness, seemingly self-obsessed and consumed by superficial things. The brother: distant and angry. The daughter: spunky with a desire to rise above it all, hungry for the love of her brother and father. I was never--not once--surprised by any of these characters until the father found an interest in the occult in the middle of the book, and by then, I just didn't buy his his sudden turn. Lots of things happened, but by the middle of the book, I kept thinking, when is something going to happen that moves me?

Part of the reason that so many events with the potential to elicit great empathy from the reader fail to do so is that the book feels like so much backstory, so much summary. We rarely get to be fully present in the past moment with the characters, and because of this, the characters feel very distant and stiff.

But ultimately, this book frustrated me because of the awkward, contorted prose. Look--I'm fine with fragments and run on sentences, but when there is no rhyme or reason as to why so many are being used, they lose their impact and importance. The sentence structures in this book are beyond affected, and they really take away from what could have been an interesting story. I quit reading 2/3 of the way in, I will admit. However, if I feel nothing by then, there is a problem.