Customer Reviews

The Mercy Seat

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is not an attempt at a review, it is comment. Being a native Oklahoman and a kind of shirt-tail historian, I have nibbled forever at the edges of that formative time in the history of Oklahoma and the making of its people, delighting in finding tidbits and hints of how it really was when my world was in the making. Rilla Askew took my hand and led me there. Gave me time to breathe the air and smell the cooking. Let me feel the rough, peeling bark of a windowless cabin's walls, put my hand on the hurt of a beautiful child in the process of being destroyed by the ambitions and defeats of the adults who make up her world. I'm waiting for my memory of it to cool so I can read it again. Visit Mattie, Fate, John. Maybe lay a compassionate hand on their shoulder. Reviews, comparisons, and synopses fail the book. It is not just a good read. It is an experience.

Rilla Askew's fascinating novel succeeds on several levels. She tells a good story -- one that made this reader want to keep turning pages long after bedtime -- and she accurately portrays a way of life and a multi-layered society that has been ignored by most American writers. However, most impressively, she mixes biblical truths, wisdom of the ages, passion, and the creative imperative, to create a morality tale that is all her own. Askew has been compared to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, but she is unique: Like them, her talent is undeniable, and like them, she writes about forgotten groups of people, but her voice and the rhythms of her language are incomparable. Her writing is informed by the King James Bible, but the beauty and power of "The Mercy Seat" are strong enough to stand on their own merits, without comparison.

This book is well worth your time and in fact will take you out of time and not let you back until you have finished the story. A well wrought novel that ranks with the best.

Rilla Askew's first novel The Mercy Seat contains some marvelous writing, but is ultimately an uneven effort. Telling the story of ten-year-old Matti Lodi and her travels from Kentucky to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), Askew attempts to retell the Cain and Abel story, in the struggles between Mattie's father John and his older brother Lafayette (significantly nicknamed "Fate"). In the novel, Askew seems to pick up and then drop again several threads of story and character. The book, however, contains two wonderful set pieces. The first is the death of Mattie's mother and the family's arrival in Oklahoma at the home of Fate, who had forged ahead. Second is the showdown between the two brother's, resulting in Fate's demise. Askew tells and retells this same event successively from the viewpoint of several characters, each narrator adding his "take" on the events. One would think this re-telling of the same thing, which takes the final third of the novel, would wear on the reader, but Askew handles it with great aplomb and suspense. She is a very promising writer.

This novel grabs you from the very first page and doesn't let go until the end. Leaves you wondering how a 10 year old girl can survive such a trip in a covered wagon to a new territory against the odds this child had to face, the heartache of her mother's death,and having to raise her brothers and sisters

I'm not sure if it's the harsh reality of conditions on the frontier of anything or that I felt pity for Mattie, but from page one I was along on the journey in the covered wagon. The moral struggles of survival versus ethics haunts me still and leaves me asking..."What would I do?"

This book is particularly interesting to me since I tramped around the area of the country that serves as the territory of much of the work. There is a uniqueness of this geographical area, given it's kinship with the Indian Nations, early white settlers, and now modern Oklahoma Statehood that is illustrated in a way that captures the unusual and unique character of the people and land it describes.

For the most part, I enjoyed this book, especially the writing itself. However, toward the last third it began to drag with too much detail. I skipped over a lot of it, just wanted to be finished with the book. And there were a few too many points of view.

This story of a family's trip to and their life in "Eye-tee," Indian Country, Oklahoma, has the potential to be a masterpiece. The biblical allusions are a nice touch, but weren't used very masterfully. Perhaps Rilla should have saved this powerful story for another day and time when she was a better versed author.

I understand this is a first time novel, and it was a good try, but this story could have been told in 250 pages, not 400. It would have been better if she spent more time in telling the story of the people, and less time describing every detail of the surroundings. The book drug on too long, too much of a good thing. I would have liked to see the character of Thula developed, and known more about what Matt thought, not just about what she did. I would not recommend this book, unless you have nothing else to read.