Book Description: In a sleepy Southern town in the 1930s, trusted newspaper reporter Mercy Land encounters a mysterious book that holds the past, secrets, and future of every person in Bay City. Trying to uncover the book’s purpose, Mercy discovers that its secrets burden her with the responsibility of choices…choices that could affect future lives forever, including hers.
My Review: The Miracle of Mercy Land by River Jordan is one of those unforgettable reads that leaves you with the knowledge that choices we make in life are ever so important and may affect more than "the today" of our lives.
Mercy Land is a traveling preacher's daughter with a sweet disposition and a faith that is hard.as.a.rock. She begins working with Doc at the small town newspaper in Bay City called The Banner. Doc is another lovable character with a heart as big as Texas but sometimes his kindness is flawed. Doc can be ever so human.
The story focuses on a book that appears on Doc's desk. The question should it be read? Are the secrets too much and what will the consequences be for the reader? By why did it appear? Doc doesn't want to let the story of a lifetime just vanish and Mercy doesn't think the book should be ignored. As Mercy points out keeping this secret can become an outright lie. A distraction that can lead to an obsession.
This isn't your typical christian fiction for there is an element of "magic" interwoven through out the story. This isn't something I can relate too but it did get the author's thought and intentions across in this delightful story.
At the end of the story Jordan does write to the reader that choices and their impact on our interconnected relationships. This 5 star read is engaging, mysterious and with magical element that lends the reader a look at choices.
*I reviewed this book for WaterBrook Multnomah Press*
About the Author: River Jordan began her writing career as a playwright where her original works were produced, including Mama Jewels: Tales from Mullet Creek, Soul, Rhythm and Blues, and Virga. Ms. Jordan's first novel, The Gin Girl (Livingston Press, 2003), has garnered such high praise as "This author writes with a hard bitten confidence comparable to Ernest Hemingway. And yet, in the Southern tradition of William Faulkner, she can knit together sentences that can take your breath." Kirkus Reviews described her second novel, The Messenger of Magnolia Street, as "a beautifully written atmospheric tale." It was applauded as "a tale of wonder" by Southern Living, who chose the novel as their Selects feature for March 2006, and described by other reviewers as " a riveting, magical mystery" and "a remarkable book." Her third novel, Saints In Limbo has been painted by some of the finest fiction voices of today as "a lyrical and relentlessly beautiful book," and "a wise, funny, joyful and deadly serious book, written with a poet's multilayered sense of metaphor and meter and a page-turning sense of urgency," and reported by Paste Magazine as "a southern gothic masterpiece."
Her fourth novel, The Miracle of Mercy Land, arrives on September 7, 2010. Her first non-fiction work, Praying for Strangers, An Adventure of the Human Spirit will be published by Penguin/Berkley April 5, 2011.
Ms. Jordan teaches and speaks around the country on "The Power of Story", and produces and hosts the radio show Clearstory Radio from Nashville. When not traveling the back roads of America, River lives with her husband and their Great Pyrenees lap dog in Nashville, Tennessee.
