Kim Antieau
![Mercy, Unbound Kim Antieau]( "Mercy, Unbound Kim Antieau")
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7
Average rating: 3.5 of 5
If Only Antieau Had Mercy on Her Reader ... 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 5 people found this review helpful.
Simply, almost cruelly put, this book is a failure. It clumsily strives to engage the young reader in a dialogue about eating-disorders ... and only succeeds at thoroughly confusing its audience. Let's begin with its "cardinal sin" ... in NO way can a young adult relate to the main character, Mercy. She has been raised by former hippies (Mom is a whacked-out environmental lawyer, Dad does the cooking). Fine. But ... she is a non-practicing Jew who chants "Om Tara tu tare ture" on her japa mala (Tibetan), is questioning her sexual identity, has a dead brother, thinks she's transforming into an angel (no joke), develops amnesia (no joke), has a grandmother who suffered through a WWII concentration camp ... and her character becomes more and more removed from reality as the story progresses. Mercy is a complete aberration. Where does a teen find her/himself in this odd construction? Good question.
At points it becomes difficult to discern if this text is focused on the AIDS crisis, on WWII concentration camps, or on feminism. I see what the author was trying to achieve, but it's artless. While a skillful writer could weave these thoughts into a coherent text (if need be), Antieau awkwardly stacks these topics on top of one another ... The result reads like a complete lack of focus. And, again, if the text wants to illuminate this topic for young people, why not keep the focus as narrow as possible.
Antieau references obscure material with which even some Ph.D. candidates are unacquainted. Foremost, she frequently weaves Mary Wollstonecraft (late Eighteenth-Century feminist) and Mary Shelley (early Nineteenth-Century Gothic novelist) into the text. Their incorporation seems more the "inside-joke" of a pompous grad-student than a genuine attempt to reach-out to young people. Second, she all-too-often compares the emaciated girls/women of The Mercywood Clinic to the zombies of Romero's "Day of the Dead." A B-film from 1985, most of my undergraduate film-studies students have never even seen this work ... let alone a ninth-grader (the target audience for this text). Likewise for references to Forman's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975) and frequent allusions to "The Twilight Zone's" episode #73 "It's a Good Life" (1961). And, this is JUST the beginning! (I am not even going to launch in the gratuitous mention of Kate Wilhelm, Margaret Sanger, Sappho, Georgia O'Keefe, Carl Jung, Franz Kafka, et al). At worst, it appears that this author seems rather insecure of her own education/knowledge of pop culture ... and feels compelled to slam everything she knows into this minuscule book. At best, she is shockingly inept at reaching young-people.
Antieau's use of profanity is both awkward and unnecessary. Simon & Schuster has placed this text in their "Simon Pulse" division: one AGAIN aimed at "young adults." However, Antieau peppers her text so thoroughly with every vulgarity imaginable, I don't imagine too many parents would be amenable to having their children bombarded with such words. And, though I personally do not object to the language, I find it stilted and a transparent effort to connect to a younger audience. It's a cheap ploy.
As a college instructor, I am always searching for texts to recommend to my students both in and out of class (read both "academically" and when "emergency" dictates). Under no circumstances would I ever suggest this text to a suffering student or even for class analysis. Like the librarian below, I am back to searching for another text on this topic.
Editorial Review:
Mercy O'Connor is becoming an angel.She can feel her wings sprouting from her shoulder blades. They itch. Sometimes she even hears them rustling.
And angels don't need to eat. So Mercy has decided she doesn't need to either. She is not sick, doesn't suffer from anorexia, is not trying to kill herself. She is an angel, and angels simply don't need food.
When her parents send her to an eating disorder clinic, Mercy is scared and confused. She isn't like the other girls who are so obviously sick. If people could just see her wings, they would know. But her wings don't come and Mercy begins to have doubts. What if she isn't really an angel? What if she's just a girl? What if she is killing herself? Can she stop?
