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Mercury by Amy Jo Burns

Literary fiction

Mercury

by Amy Jo Burns

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Quick take

Brimming with family drama and small-town secrets, a touching ode to a struggling but resilient blue-collar America.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Multiple_Viewpoints

    Multiple viewpoints

  • Illustrated icon, Slow_Build

    Slow build

  • Illustrated icon, Family_Drama

    Family drama

  • Illustrated icon, Rural

    Rural

Synopsis

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.

Content warning

This book contains scenes that depict miscarriage.

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of Mercury.

Mercury

1.

Waylon Joseph crouched behind Mercury’s ballfield bleachers on the south end of town, smoking a cigarette and hiding from his wife.

A day moon hung in the June sky as a crop of boys played a baseball game beneath it. Tiny mitts waved in the air as the ball soared wide. The rest of the park stooped beyond the field—a moldering pond, a slanted gazebo. I-80 beckoned just down the road and past the cedar trees, and yet Way couldn’t hear even one truck’s sorry bellow as it sped past.

The air around him felt thick, like honey and longing.

Waylon tapped the edge of his Salem with his finger, and ash fluttered to the dirt. Today, he told himself. Today you have to tell her. He’d said the same thing yesterday. The day before, too. Every day since he’d visited the bank.

Marley appeared between the bleachers’ rusted planks—the burnt-orange patina slicing her right through her middle. In her pink coach’s ball cap and cutoff jeans, she didn’t look a day past eighteen, when Waylon had fallen in love with her. She’d been somebody else’s high school sweetheart back then. Now, her auburn hair tangled in the breeze as she hoisted her hand toward the sky, and a field of eight-year-old boys waited for her to speak.

“Look alive,” she called toward the outfield.

A crack split the air as the other team’s batter hit a pop-up. The center fielder snatched the ball, and the inning ended.

Way leaned his forehead against the bleacher’s hot metal. It had taken only two words from Marley’s mouth to snap the boys to attention. She had such sway, and she couldn’t even see it. In the last eight years, so much of their marriage had become about power—who had it, who gave it away. A slippery, constant leveling of the scales.

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Why I love it

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.

Member ratings (8,698)

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Family drama
View all
The Last One at the Wedding
The Night We Lost Him
Madwoman
Hum
Family Happiness
Husbands & Lovers
Same As It Ever Was
Jackpot Summer
The Lion Women of Tehran
Did I Ever Tell You?
Real Americans
The Reappearance of Rachel Price
Just for the Summer
All We Were Promised
Hard by a Great Forest
Family Family
Northwoods
Mercury
The Second Chance Year
A Winter in New York
Check & Mate
What We Kept to Ourselves
The Leftover Woman
While You Were Out
Evil Eye
Just Another Missing Person
Family Lore
Little Monsters
The Connellys of County Down
Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
Paper Names
Divine Rivals
Hang the Moon
The Last Russian Doll
Maame
White Horse
The Family Game
The Fortunes of Jaded Women
When We Were Bright and Beautiful
You're Invited
Marrying the Ketchups
Part of Your World
The Good Left Undone
The Verifiers
The Unsinkable Greta James
Don't Cry for Me
Black Cake
Olga Dies Dreaming
The Family
The Book of Magic
Sankofa
Everything We Didn't Say
Apples Never Fall
The Sweetest Remedy
The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina
We Are the Brennans
Skye Falling
Last Summer at the Golden Hotel
Things We Lost to the Water
Libertie
What's Mine and Yours
The Bad Muslim Discount
The Push
The Chicken Sisters
In a Holidaze
White Ivy
The Star-Crossed Sisters of Tuscany
Practical Magic
Head Over Heels
The Vanishing Half
All Adults Here
The Kingdom of Back
I Have No Secrets
Saving Zoë
Color Me In
Past Perfect Life
Things You Save in a Fire
There's Something About Sweetie
All That You Leave Behind
The Other Woman
Small Fry
The Winter Sister
The Rules of Magic
& Sons