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Summary
Summary
Winner of a 2016 Alex Award
Named a Best Book of 2015 by the Kansas City Star
In this intricate novel of psychological suspense, a fatal discovery near the high school ignites a witch-hunt in a Southeast Texas refinery town, unearthing communal and family secrets that threaten the lives of the town's girls.
In Port Sabine, the air is thick with oil, superstition reigns, and dreams hang on making a winning play. All eyes are on Mercy Louis, the star of the championship girls' basketball team. Mercy seems destined for greatness, but the road out of town is riddled with obstacles. There is her grandmother, Evelia, a strict evangelical who has visions of an imminent Rapture and sees herself as the keeper of Mercy's virtue. There are the cryptic letters from Charmaine, the mother who abandoned Mercy at birth. And then there's Travis, the boy who shakes the foundation of her faith.
At the periphery of Mercy's world floats team manager Illa Stark, a lonely wallflower whose days are spent caring for a depressed mother crippled in a refinery accident. Like the rest of the town, Illa is spellbound by Mercy's beauty and talent, but a note discovered in Mercy's gym locker reveals that her life may not be as perfect as it appears.
The last day of school brings the disturbing discovery, and as summer unfolds and the police investigate, every girl becomes a suspect. When Mercy collapses on the opening night of the season, Evelia prophesies that she is only the first to fall, and soon, other girls are afflicted by the mysterious condition, sending the town into a tailspin, and bringing Illa and Mercy together in an unexpected way.
Evocative and unsettling, The Unraveling of Mercy Louis charts the downfall of one town's golden girl while exploring the brutality and anxieties of girlhood in America.
Author Notes
Keija Parssinen was born in Saudi Arabia, and spent twelve years there before her family moved to Austin Texas. After high school, she attended Princeton University, where she studied English Literature and received a certificate from the Program for the Study of Women and Gender. She earned her MFA at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote fellow, a Teaching and Writing fellow and the student editor for the Iowa Short Fiction Contest.
She currently directs the Quarry Writers' Workshop and works with students in the Cedar Crest College's Pan-European MFA program.
Her debut novel, The Ruins of Us, won a Michener-Copernicus award. She is also the author of The Unraveling of Mercy Louis.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Parssinen follows up The Ruins of Us, her debut, a portrait of a Saudia Arabian family in turmoil, with a less-nuanced tale of extremism, this time in Port Sabine, a Gulf Coast town redolent of "swamp rot and refinery gas." Contributing to the miasma-like atmosphere are factors environmental and moral. As Port Sabine's refinery spews noxious fumes into the air, the discovery of a baby's corpse in a dumpster unleashes a pervasive sense of unease. Soon the town finds itself in the grips of religious fundamentalism, witch hunts, misogyny, and a "mass psychogenic disorder" in which girls lose control of their bodies. At the center of it all is Mercy Louis, a seventh-generation Cajun and star basketball player who was abandoned by her teenaged mother as an infant. She is raised by her grandmother, Maw Maw, a zealot who demands that Mercy, tainted by her supposed "weak blood," be "twice as good as other girls." Enamored of Mercy is Illa Stark, a shy photographer whose mother has never recovered from injuries sustained in a devastating refinery explosion. Mercy's and Illa's respective family dramas and sexual awakenings are nicely drawn, but the surrounding characters-fanatics, slimy energy executives, and poetry-spouting boyfriends-tend to be two-dimensional and the dialogue occasionally melodramatic. Despite some beautifully eerie touches, Parssinen's combustible mix of Bayou gothic, morality tale, and coming-of-age story never quite ignites. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In small, religious Port Sabine, Texas, a newborn's body is found abandoned in a convenience-store dumpster. Amid intense uproar, the medical examiner rules the death a homicide, and the entire town casts eyes about for the murderer. Mercy Louis, Port Sabine's basketball superstar, is struggling to come to grips with a disastrous showing at the state semifinals that cost her a bundle of virtually guaranteed scholarships. Raised by her evangelical grandmother, Evelia, Mercy is haunted by a strong connection to the abandoned baby, especially now that her mother, Charmaine, has resurfaced and reminded Mercy of her own abandonment. In the heat of the hunt for the baby's murderer, Mercy faces the fallout from secrets held by her coach, by Evelia, and by Charmaine as her safety is threatened by those she most trusts. Past crimes run a dark thread through this coming-of-age fable that calls to mind Laura Lippman's stand-alone novels and even The Scarlet Letter. Parssinen excels here at capturing the dueling emotions that rule teenage girls' relationships, and the dire consequences of societal pressures.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AMERICAN TELEVISION WOULD have it that high schools are the site of endless intrigue: In cult favorites like "Twin Peaks" and "Veronica Mars," teenagers enact adult dramas in miniature, sleuthing in trench coats before joining their peers in ill-fitted dresses and wrinkled suits at prom. Such is the lot of the American teenager, a creature at once juvenile and jaded. "The Unraveling of Mercy Louis," Keija Parssinen's second novel, treats us to another hard-boiled teenager as forceful as she is vulnerable. In Port Sabine, a Texas town ravaged by an explosion at the local oil refinery, the high school student and basketball prodigy Mercy Louis navigates a series of disasters. Abandoned by her blasphemous mother in infancy, Mercy lives with her grandmother Evelia, a fiercely devout Christian who never tires of prophesying an imminent Rapture. Narrated alternately by Mercy and Illa, the diminutive manager of Mercy's basketball team, the novel is cinematic from the start. It opens with a tantalizingly violent scene that could easily come at the beginning of a television series, setting the stage for the fraught investigation to follow: When an aborted fetus is found in a convenience store Dumpster, the conservative inhabitants of Port Sabine set off on a witch hunt for the culprit. Tensions mount as the discovery of the bloodied fetus is followed by an unbearable heat wave ("The sun bakes the mud banks of the bayou to cracking"), an unexplained stench and a mass epidemic in which the girls of Port Sabine develop mysterious tics. According to Evelia, these events are portents, signs of a "world gone rotten" that will soon come to a spectacular end. As Mercy and Port Sabine "unravel," the novel's tone grows urgent, deliciously dark and sumptuously gothic. The book is sustained by a sense of crisis that frightens and fascinates us. Like Port Sabine, Mercy is poised between twin catastrophes, the defining trauma of the refinery accident and the prospect of apocalypse, the sinful circumstance of her birth and the threat of eternal damnation. Like so many books that hinge on a mystery, "The Unraveling of Mercy Louis" cannot withstand its culminating explanation: The book's strength lies in the complexity of the problems it poses, and it loses something with their neat resolution. Parssinen sets a trap for herself, asking unanswerable questions and proceeding to answer them. But there are moments when she strikes the delicate balance between simplicity and sincerity with grace, as when Illa pines for a crush "like a body misses a bone." "The Unraveling of Mercy Louis" isn't a clever or philosophical book so much as a narrative one. If the symbolism is sometimes childish ("Mercy" learns the lesson of forgiveness) and the prose sometimes borders on purple ("How do you get back to a feeling? You can't just buy a ticket," Mercy muses unoriginally), the story is for the most part executed with the instinctive elegance of an athletic maneuver. Like the girls on Mercy's basketball team, who "balance so perfectly between control and chaos," Parssinen has an intuitive grasp of language's vital rhythms. And there is something appealing about writing that places such high emotional demands on its readers. When Illa discovers letters from Mercy's long-lost mother, she is surprised but impressed that the woman dares to seek Mercy out: Illa "admires anyone with the guts to ask for something she doesn't deserve." So too do we admire Parssinen's novel for having the audacity to take itself so seriously, evoking the fumbling, adolescent overeagerness that's so much less afraid than adults know how to be. BECCA ROTHFELD is an intern at n+1. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Slate Book Review and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.
School Library Journal Review
An adult title that could have easily been published as YA. The teen protagonists are complicated and damaged, and the adults around them are clueless and sometimes cruel. At the heart of the story is Mercy Louis, a basketball star with a lifelong streak of control and perfection. She is at the end of her junior year in high school and coming off a devastating loss at the State basketball championship. What was supposed to be a triumph for her, her team, and her small Texas town, Port Sabine, has her numb with embarrassment. Like a harbinger of bad news, the team's loss begins a downward spiral for both Mercy and the town itself. The body of a newborn baby is found in a dumpster, and Port Sabine becomes a place that looks at its teenage girls with suspicion and contempt as police search for the child's mother. Along with the heat, tensions rise throughout the summer at home and in town. Mercy's long-lost mother reappears in her life, and the teen falls in love. Mercy finds herself wondering if being perfect and staying in control for God and basketball is what she wants after all. Her doubts will resonate with teens, especially those who have become disenchanted with authority figures and adult hypocrisy. Port Sabine's obsession with both Mercy and the virtues she represents make this dark coming-of-age story a compelling read. VERDICT Parssinen has created fully realized teen characters in a religious Southern small town straight out of a Carson McCullers short story.-Meghan Cirrito, formerly at Brooklyn Public Library © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A modern Southern gothic with a feminist edge and the tense pacing of a thriller.Port Sabine, Texas: an economically depressed oil refinery town on the Gulf, heavy with gossip and religious superstition. With a fatal explosion at the refinery still lingering in the residents' collective memory, they turn their focus to Mercy Louis, the star of the high school girls basketball team. Mercy knows how good she is, and in her private way, basketball is her religion, but she must hide this from her caretaker grandmother, Evelia, a fierce evangelical. Evelia's vision for, and of, her granddaughter is narrow; Mercy knows she has to be twice as pious as any other girl to make up for her absentee, crack-addict mother and be saved with her grandmother in the approaching rapture. In another corner of town, Illa Stark chafes in the ongoing role of nurse to her mother, a badly burned victim of the refinery explosion who has since mostly given up on life. Illa is more at peace as the manager of the girls basketball team, and she watches Mercy from afar with a hopeful tenderness. Meanwhile, the discovery of a fetus in a town dumpster has emotions in Port Sabine running hot and especially emphasizes the disempowerment of the town's young women. "Around here, you'd think being a girl was the fucking crime," a minor character says. It's interesting to watch these moments of heightened awareness play up against the gothic structure. Mercy is every bit the innocent, blindly reliant on her grandmother and her basketball coach as pressures pile up on her, summer wears on and her relationships shift in distressing ways. There is a slight disconnect between Parssinen's piercing narrative style and Mercy's willful ignorance, but Illa's ability to see the bigger pictures is, in story and style, a balancing grace. Beautiful and awful, enraging and sad, atmospheric and page-turning: an accomplished novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
More is poisoned than just the air in the small refinery town of Port Sabine, TX. The discovery of a dead newborn in a dumpster brings out the worst of the community, firing up small-minded politicians and launching a witch hunt to find and punish the mother. It is no wonder that Mercy Louis and her fellow high school seniors are scrambling for passports out of town. As a basketball standout Mercy should have it made. An athletic scholarship is on the cards until the pressures from home, the town, and her own fears cause her body to crumble. Mercy's spasms affect those around her, including her rigidly fundamentalist grandmother, her best friend, Annie, who uses sex to compensate for unloving parents, and Illa, the self-effacing team manager trapped into caring for a bitter mother. They will betray one another before finding ways to face fears, uncover secrets, and offer forgiveness. VERDICT The solid pacing and strong characters in the author's second novel (after The Ruins of Us) provide a captivating read with the same tension and pleasures of being caught up in a well-matched and high-energy basketball game. [See Prepub Alert, 9/29/14.]-Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll. Lib., NC (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
