Mercury

Families are messy, complicated things. I am always excited to read stories that capture their multifaceted nature.

This engrossing novel follows the travails of the first family of Mercury, PA. It starts simply, “‘Look alive,’ she called toward the outfield.” A coach’s encouragement and a mother’s dearest wish. But in the rust-belt town of Mercury in 1999, Marley’s hope is not a certainty. Times are tough. And the family Marley married into doesn’t make anything easier. Their roofing business is struggling, their patriarch is raging, and long-held secrets wait just beneath the surface.

A generation later, Marley and her mother-in-law still do the “woman’s work” of keeping the family fed, dressed, uplifted. Marley’s husband Waylon is a stoic. He’s “the strong one” of his three brothers, repairing roofs as well as the damage his dad does all over town. His brothers and his father, his mom and his wife balance on his shoulders; he carries the literal and emotional weight. He and Marly are well matched in compassion and fortitude, but people can only take so much. When the family’s long-held secrets begin to emerge, fissures quickly erupt.

Mercury is a novel for our times. I had to keep reading, not only to marvel at how true-to-life Amy Jo Burns had made this story—how familiar these people are to anyone with a messy family—but to see how this particular family’s secrets change them. I’m still thinking about them, about us, and hoping for a better tomorrow.

It’s 1990 and seventeen-year-old Marley West is blazing into the river valley town of Mercury, Pennsylvania. A perpetual loner, she seeks a place at someone’s table and a family of her own. The first thing she sees when she arrives in town is three men standing on a rooftop. Their silhouettes blot out the sun.

The Joseph brothers become Marley’s whole world before she can blink. Soon, she is young wife to one, The One Who Got Away to another, and adopted mother to them all. As their own mother fades away and their roofing business crumbles under the weight of their unwieldy father’s inflated ego, Marley steps in to shepherd these unruly men. Years later, an eerie discovery in the church attic causes old wounds to resurface and suddenly the family’s survival hangs in the balance. With Marley as their light, the Joseph brothers must decide whether they can save the family they’ve always known—or whether together they can build something stronger in its place.