{"id":172,"date":"2018-12-31T11:02:36","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T11:02:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=172"},"modified":"2018-12-31T11:02:36","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T11:02:36","slug":"272","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=172","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book Review: THE UNRAVELING OF MERCY LOUIS"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Port Sabine is a small, derelict refinery town on the Gulf Coast of East Texas, economically depressed and environmentally despoiled, beset by class divisions, small minds, and smaller hearts. Port Sabine\u2019s claims to fame are a refinery explosion and the lone bright spot\u2014the girls\u2019 high-school basketball team and its star, Mercy Louis. Mercy lives on the bayou\u2019s edge with her grandmother, a harsh, unforgiving woman, a member of a \u201cHoly Roller\u201d church who has visions and spouts prophecy of the imminent Rapture. \u201cShe\u2019s prophesying again.\u2026Vivid and gut-socking, they come on every few weeks now…. Like turkey vultures aswarm around the dying, she says of the visions. This world is in its death throes.\u201d When the body of an infant is found in a dumpster and people fall ill mysteriously, the weight of suspicion and the judgment of fire-and-brimstone religion land heavily on the girls of Port Sabine.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Keija Parssinen<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a> has conjured a smartly plotted, fast-paced Gothic brew of superstition, fear, jealousy, conspiracy, politics, money, sex, love, and misogyny. Mercy is an innocent and tries to be worthy but the bar is too high. \u201cI should be glad to go to heaven, but all I can think about is that December 31 falls in the middle of basketball season.\u2026There\u2019s too much I haven\u2019t had the chance to do, not just winning State, but graduating, going to college, kissing a boy, falling in love.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Parssinen has a gift for describing the primordial landscape. \u201c[T]he grass sweats dewy beads, the sun bakes the mud banks of the bayou to cracking\u2026cypress trees weep through their branches. Tangles of velvety morning glories grow inky blue and secretive in the thicket at the roadside, bursts of Mexican hat cascading\u2026like spilled paint. On the air, the smell of ripening things.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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She also has an aptitude for the charming image. As Mercy describes it, \u201cI vacuum up her words from where they hang unclaimed in the air; I perch them in the shadowed space where I keep her other confessions, a line of grackles on a bare branch by my heart.\u201d And the astute analogy: \u201cStudents buzz down the hallways, atoms of anxiety fusing with one another to form dangerous compounds.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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There is wry humor here, as well. \u201cThe truth is like fish. When people ask for it, they usually don\u2019t want it eyes and all.\u201d And this: \u201cIn a small town, it\u2019s hard to tell fact from fiction, the apocryphal making the rounds alongside the God\u2019s honest until they\u2019re indistinguishable and both cited like gospel.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The Unraveling of Mercy Louis<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a> is a modern fairy tale that harks back to the Brothers Grimm. It reminds me of a counterintuitive but brilliant blend of Cynthia Bond\u2019s Ruby <\/em>and Buzz Bissinger\u2019s Friday Night Lights<\/em>, a distinctive creation. This story ends with beginnings, the pitch-perfect conclusion testing the adage that the truth will set you free. \u201cUnravel\u201d has two definitions: 1) undo and 2) investigate and solve or explain. Parssinen\u2019s novel does both.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Review of The Unraveling of Mercy Louis<\/em> by Keija Parssinen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":171,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[52,55,12,8,17,21,15],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fiction","tag-literaryfiction","tag-lonestarreview","tag-lonestarliterarycom","tag-mystery","tag-suspense","tag-texasauthor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}