Mercy Hill
A Novel
-
- 10,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A debut family novel about four sisters growing up on the campus of the underfunded state mental hospital where their strong-willed mother serves as head of psychiatry. A richly moving story of sisterhood, loyalty, and mental health in America.
"Mercy Hill—both the place and the people who live there—will stay with you long after you put the book down.” —Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls
The Cross sisters have lived their entire lives on the sprawling grounds of Mercy Hill, the embattled Raleigh mental hospital run by their formidable mother. Since childhood, JJ, Caro, Mimi, and Denise have been inculcated with their mother's mission: they'll work alongside her to protect Mercy Hill from the fate of other state hospitals across the country, which are being gutted and closed, one by one.
After an incident involving the highest-security ward, Mercy Hill faces greater scrutiny than ever, and Lisa Cross pushes each of her daughters even harder in the name of her mission. As the sisters cross into adulthood, the pressures of their isolated environment and mercurial mother set them on different—and perilous—paths. And as the battle wages on, youngest sister and narrator Denise grapples with the added responsibility that comes from being the last hope for their mother’s dreams.
Set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with Mercy Hill’s fate hanging in the balance, Denise recounts the transformations that shape and destroy her family, along with the landscape of mental healthcare in the United States. With sharp insight and real humor, debut novelist Hannah Thurman captures the turmoil of growing up, the true meaning of a calling, and the indelible bonds of family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Four sisters grow up fast on the grounds of a state mental institution run by their mother in Thurman's incisive debut novel. Narrator Denise Cross looks back to 1999, when she was nine and her driven, demanding mother, Lisa, head psychiatrist at "crumbling" Mercy Hill in North Carolina, moved Denise and her three older sisters up two grades by transferring them to a magnet school. Lisa hopes they'll go on to earn medical degrees and help save the floundering facility, and is desperate to speed up the process. The move, reluctantly assented to by the girls' increasingly restless stay-at-home dad, works out about as well as might be expected. The four sisters are relentlessly bullied at their new school and cope by getting into trouble. In the summer, Lisa tasks them with helping out in the hospital's understaffed wards, cleaning up and taking care of residents, and continues putting them to work during the school year. Denise's scrutiny of her family illuminates several consequential years in their lives, showing how she and her sisters were shaped by their experiences "volunteering" on the wards, and how working for their mother led to tragedy. Throughout, Thurman, who grew up near a similar institution, offers a revealing and nuanced view of the asylum's social value and the stigma that leads to its downfall. It's a perceptive take on an unusual childhood.
