A Surprisingly Complex Tale of Secrets, Love, and Desperation
What? A 5-star story that I was not expecting? It's absolutely true, and it is fun to go into a book blindly and enjoy it so much! Mercury is more than just a dying town, it is a character . Think of the character of Death in The Book Thief, and you'll have an idea (even though Mercury is a totally different book.) This is my first time to read a book by Amy Jo Burns, and I am impressed with the fast character development and twisty, uncertain plot.
Mercury is barely surviving, “a shrunken steel industry outpost” that not only lacks a CSI unit or a chief of police but has only a self-appointed mayor named Mick Joseph.
That doesn’t seem to be too promising; Mick may think he is made of steel like his town's former fortune, but his physical strength as a Vietnam vet is the opposite of his mental and moral character. Mick is a man “… [who] had built so many things in his life that he never bothered to take care of. Houses, marriages, sons. … Mick was dapper, and devil-stained, and draining as hell.”
But wait. There is a whole cast of flawed characters in the Joseph family and their relationships are what kept me reading the pages just as quickly as I could. There are three adult sons. Readers first meet Waylon, a husband and father who knows "how to signal trouble but never how to avoid it.” There have clearly been problems in his marriage to Marley, a good looking and hot blooded woman, because she looks at him with betrayal in her eyes. Yet Waylon’s mother had labeled Way the steady one of her three sons. How much can the reader trust this family matriarch, a woman described by one of her sons as someone who went insane? There are some ominous feelings about this family and what drove Mrs. Joseph out of her mind, for her youngest son Shay clearly remember what his mother had said – that it’s safer to be forgotten than to be seen in their family.
Then just as one starts to feel that Marley has stepped into the role of matriarch for her father-in-law as well as two of his sons and her husband, the third adult son, as well as the father to Marley's son Theo... bam! The reader learns that Marley's past hardly prepared her for the role she's playing in the Joseph family home. She and her mother blew into Mercury from Ohio, and their regret at leaving behind a Blockbuster move punch card indicates their social status. The 9-punched card isn’t a loss in Mercury since it doesn’t have enough going on to even have a Blockbuster video store. However, neither Marley’s mother Ruth nor Marley are too concerned; they rarely stayed in one place more than a year. Until Mercury reached out and got its talons into Marley.
Surprisingly, there might be an undertone of Christian religion in this book, from the gold cross that Waylon has worn around his neck and never removed since age 10 to the significance of the Presbyterian Church, a symbol of “a spark of the eternal in an ending world.” Since I have not yet read the whole book, it is too early to tell. Possibly that story element is part of the unreliable drama and mystery because the church turns out to be a crime scene. While inspecting the church’s leaking roof as part of the family's roofing business,, Waylon feels an unexplained breeze near an attic door, painted shut. Purple dye seeps out, stains from leaking rainwater on stacks of old choir robes. At first the repulsive odor seems to stem from mounds of bat feces - until the brothers find a human body.
I have to find out where this emotional train wreck is headed! And I hope I don't have to wait until Mercury's publication on January 2, 2024!
Mercury is barely surviving, “a shrunken steel industry outpost” that not only lacks a CSI unit or a chief of police but has only a self-appointed mayor named Mick Joseph.
That doesn’t seem to be too promising; Mick may think he is made of steel like his town's former fortune, but his physical strength as a Vietnam vet is the opposite of his mental and moral character. Mick is a man “… [who] had built so many things in his life that he never bothered to take care of. Houses, marriages, sons. … Mick was dapper, and devil-stained, and draining as hell.”
But wait. There is a whole cast of flawed characters in the Joseph family and their relationships are what kept me reading the pages just as quickly as I could. There are three adult sons. Readers first meet Waylon, a husband and father who knows "how to signal trouble but never how to avoid it.” There have clearly been problems in his marriage to Marley, a good looking and hot blooded woman, because she looks at him with betrayal in her eyes. Yet Waylon’s mother had labeled Way the steady one of her three sons. How much can the reader trust this family matriarch, a woman described by one of her sons as someone who went insane? There are some ominous feelings about this family and what drove Mrs. Joseph out of her mind, for her youngest son Shay clearly remember what his mother had said – that it’s safer to be forgotten than to be seen in their family.
Then just as one starts to feel that Marley has stepped into the role of matriarch for her father-in-law as well as two of his sons and her husband, the third adult son, as well as the father to Marley's son Theo... bam! The reader learns that Marley's past hardly prepared her for the role she's playing in the Joseph family home. She and her mother blew into Mercury from Ohio, and their regret at leaving behind a Blockbuster move punch card indicates their social status. The 9-punched card isn’t a loss in Mercury since it doesn’t have enough going on to even have a Blockbuster video store. However, neither Marley’s mother Ruth nor Marley are too concerned; they rarely stayed in one place more than a year. Until Mercury reached out and got its talons into Marley.
Surprisingly, there might be an undertone of Christian religion in this book, from the gold cross that Waylon has worn around his neck and never removed since age 10 to the significance of the Presbyterian Church, a symbol of “a spark of the eternal in an ending world.” Since I have not yet read the whole book, it is too early to tell. Possibly that story element is part of the unreliable drama and mystery because the church turns out to be a crime scene. While inspecting the church’s leaking roof as part of the family's roofing business,, Waylon feels an unexplained breeze near an attic door, painted shut. Purple dye seeps out, stains from leaking rainwater on stacks of old choir robes. At first the repulsive odor seems to stem from mounds of bat feces - until the brothers find a human body.
I have to find out where this emotional train wreck is headed! And I hope I don't have to wait until Mercury's publication on January 2, 2024!