Mercy

Picoult, Jodi. Mercy. New York: Washington Square, 2001. Print. (400 pages)

            Jodi Picoult is a fantastic writer. She does such a good job of capturing her reader and making it impossible for them to set the book down. This is one of many Picoult books I’ve read and it definitely lived up to its author’s legacy. Picoult is known for taking risks in her writing and exploring subjects that are sometimes avoided by most writers. Before reading this book, I had a very black and white understanding of murder, but this book showed me a whole bunch of gray area that I never thought about.

            Picoult’s strategy of organizing the book into multiple narrators adds a very nice effect to the reader’s experience. In most books, the reader only gets to view inside the main character’s thoughts, but Picoult’s style allows you to look inside each person’s mind. Because of this, the reader has multiple opinions throughout the book. You can like a character during one chapter, then find out on another that they are actually very selfish and cowardly and decide to hate them. You could also hear about a husband killing his wife and think he was a monster, but then as the story went one and facts and thought processes were revealed, you would change you r mind and think he was innocent.

            Parts of the book that were a little hard to follow were the flashbacks, the murder alibi, and the opinions of the main character, Cam. There wasn’t a very big change between the behavior of the characters between the present and the past in this book which made flashbacks confusing. Sometimes I would start reading a section and then get really confused because I didn’t know why this event was happening. For instance, if the main married couple just had a fight and then the book immediately went into a memory about fishing, that would be hard to follow. The murderer’s alibi was hard to follow because it was incomplete for the entire first three quarters of the book. Events of that night were also revealed at different times throughout the story which sort of jumbled-up the alibi in my mind. The most difficult part, however, was keeping track of Cam’s thoughts. He went back and forth throughout the entire book either sympathizing with the murderer, or completely hating him. I guess this makes sense in real life, but when his though process was written down, it was a little hard to follow. Plus, before each section there was a hand written note to mark the beginning of it. These were confusing because it was clear that they were written by Cam to someone else, but the “someone else” was hard to decode. IT also seemed like these notes were from the future, which caused even more confusion. To avoid this, I normally read the note, but didn’t dwell on it too long.

            Picoult did a wonderful job in Mercy providing the reader with an intriguing and dual sided story to a very complicated subject. I would recommend this book to anyone wishing to read about a subject that tests the boundaries set by our societies today.(533 words)