Mercury by Amy Jo Burns

Mercury by Amy Jo Burns
Publication date: January 2, 2024
Genres: Book Clubs, Fiction, Historical, Literary

Bookshop, Amazon

Marley’s had a nomadic life with her mother so when they pull into the small town of Mercury, Pennsylvania she’s hoping this is a place where they’ll stay awhile. In her first afternoon of exploring the town, she finds herself at a high school baseball game. As the game’s end two teens start fighting, ending up rolling on the ground. This is Marley’s introduction to the Joseph family and the jumping off point for Amy Jo Burns’ new novel, Mercury.

The scrapping boys are Baylor and Waylon Joseph. While the crowd ignores them, one word from their mother, Elise, is enough to stop them. Once separated, it’s Baylor who talks to the 17-year-old Marley. And with that she finds herself with a brooding boyfriend who opens the door to the kind of family she’s always longed for. Soon enough, Marley becomes a fixture at Friday night dinners, listening and watching as a rambunctious, fractious group of males coalesce around the quiet, impenetrable Elise. Her love for her own mother remains the same, but her admiration for Elise as a matriarch grows, even when the feeling isn’t reciprocated.

Mercury alternates between the past and the present, stitching the two together in the same way Marley becomes sewn into the Josephs. In the present it’s been eight years since she arrived in Mercury and now not only has she married into the family she, her husband, and their baby live in an apartment above the family home and Marley helps out with the family’s roofing business—a multi-generational venture that has been slowly run into the ground by the father’s selfishness and ego.

A decades old mystery precipitates a reckoning for the entire family and provides Mercury’s momentum, but the novel’s deep well of complexity is found in its characters. There is Marley, with her idyllic notions of family, who finds her sense of self being dismantled by the drama around the Josephs. The brothers each struggle with their own issues of identity, rivalry, and self-worth. Elise, the Joseph matriarch, was the only one who eluded me. I was never able to understand the why of her, especially in regards to her relationship with Marley. It was like clouds passing across the sun. Each one obscured the brightness Marley longed for, but then returned, only to disappear again. That she was a deeply unhappy woman was clear, but why was not.

This is Burns’ second novel, always tricky territory for an author, but there’s no wobble in her trajectory as a writer of gorgeous character studies amidst real life. She sketches and fills in the blue-collar, former steel town of Mercury and its inhabitants so thoroughly that reading is like being there. Marley, the Josephs, and all the dynamics of siblings, friends, parents, and spouses compel the reader from the beginning to the end of Mercury.

I loved Burns’ debut novel, Shiner. It’s a stunning portrayal of life for four women in the Appalachians.

 

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