From Publishers Weekly
In the first of Swedish novelist Ekman's trilogy, a young urban midwife moves to the remote Svartattnet, where she struggles to understand the culture of the Sami Lapp reindeer herders. Narrator Risten introduces readers to her adoptive mother, Hillevi Klarin, who grew up with Hillevi's aunt and uncle. Though the aunt considers Hillevi's passion for midwifery to be a career beneath her, Hillevi leaves Uppsala in 1916 and moves to the northern wilderness. One night, Hillevi is summoned to the isolated village of Lubben to deliver a baby she suspects is the result of abuse. When she arrives, she realizes she is in over her head. When Elis, a boy from Lubben, follows Hillevi back to her home, he sets in motion an unexpected chain of events that will haunt her for years. Hillevi also struggles to fit into the tight-knit Lapp community and begins to understand the difficulties of being an outsider. Ekman (
A City of Light) describes everything with an unflinching eye, from tuberculosis to the particulars of sex and birth, and the harsh beauty of the Swedish landscape.
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Review
"Ekman describes everything with an unflinching eye, from tuberculosis to the particulars of sex and birth, and the harsh beauty of the Swedish landscape."—Publishers Weekly
(
Publishers Weekly 20090628)
"The story will capture you."—Barbara Ardinger, ForeWord
(Barbara Ardinger
ForeWord 20090821)
"Sense of place is not just a combination of geography and culture, it is a synergy of the two. Swedish author Kerstin Ekman doesn''t seek to describe sense of place in her novel God''s Mercy. She does something far more difficult. Sense of place so permeates the novel it moves from being a setting to almost its own unspoken character."—Tim Gebhart, BlogCritics.org
(Tim Gebhart
BlogCritics.org 20081001)
"The writing is gorgeously evocative of a place many of us will never see. . . . Credit is also due to translator Linda Schenck, who ably shifts this exquisite prose into English ."—Diane Leach, PopMatters.com
(Diane Leach
PopMatters.com )
“God''s Mercy is a story about outsiders. In classic works about the transformation of Sweden written by men, the hero often exclaims: ‘I don''t want to be like them.’ Kerstin Ekman’s narrative orbits around the key phrase: ‘They''re not really like us.’ The men say it about the women, Hillevi’s aunt says it about the poor, Hillevi says it about the Sami. It is a statement that echoes throughout the blood-drenched history of the twentieth century. They’re not like us, we don’t want them living with us, they shouldn’t live. But who do we mean by ‘us’?”—Dagens Nyheter (Sweden)
(Dagens nyheter )
