The Shape of Mercy: A Novel

By Susan Meissner

Description:

“We understand what we want to understand.”Leaving a life of privilege to strike out on her own, Lauren Durough breaks with convention and her family’s expectations by choosing a state college over Stanford and earning her own income over accepting her ample monthly allowance. She takes a part-time job from 83-year-old librarian Abigail Boyles, who asks Lauren to transcribe the journal entries of her ancestor Mercy Hayworth, a victim of the Salem witch trials. Almost immediately, Lauren finds herself drawn to this girl who lived and died four centuries ago. As the fervor around the witch accusations increases, Mercy becomes trapped in the worldview of the day, unable to fight the overwhelming influence of snap judgments and superstition, and Lauren realizes that the secrets of Mercy’s story extend beyond the pages of her diary, living on in the mysterious, embittered Abigail. The strength of her affinity with Mercy forces Lauren to take a startling new look at her own life, including her relationships with Abigail, her college roommate, and a young man named Raul. But on the way to the truth, will Lauren find herself playing the helpless defendant or the misguided judge? Can she break free from her own perceptions and see who she really is?

Book Takeaway:

Whatever the crowd says, we too easily believe. We need to fix our eyes on God, not the crowd. We have to train ourselves to see people like God sees people. Having that kind of vision takes incredible discipline because our nature is not to see things like He does.

Awards:

Why the author wrote this book:

I’ve had an interest in what happened in Salem for a long time, beginning when I was thirteen and in a play about the same subject and then later in high school when I read The Crucible. The Salem Witch Trials reveal rather poignantly how rushed judgments and fear can bring out the worst in us. Everyone who was executed in Salem in 1692 was later exonerated. Hysteria, not reason, ruled the day for those long months when innocent people were accused of horrible acts. It didn’t matter how long or how loud the accused proclaimed their innocence. In Salem, you were whatever the crowd said you were. I could have chosen Dachau as the setting. Or Rwanda. Salem wasn’t the first setting people died because the crowd accused them of deserving death and no one stood up to say, “Now hold on there.”