The Blurb:
What if you had the power to amend choices you made in the past? Would you do it even if it changed everything?Mercy Land has made some unexpected choices for a young woman in the 1930s. The sheltered daughter of a traveling preacher, she chooses to leave her rural community to move to nearby Bay City on the warm, gulf-waters of southern Alabama. There she finds a job at the local paper and spends seven years making herself indispensable to old Doc Philips, the publisher and editor. Then she gets a frantic call at dawn—it’s the biggest news story of her life, and she can’t print a word of it.
Doc has come into possession of a curious book that maps the lives of everyone in Bay City—decisions they’ve made in the past, and how those choices affect the future. Mercy and Doc are consumed by the mystery locked between the pages—Doc because he hopes to right a very old wrong, and Mercy because she wants to fulfill the book’s strange purpose. But when a mystery from Mercy’s past arrives by train, she begins to understand that she will have to make choices that will deeply affect everyone she loves—forever.
My Review:
I choose this book to review because I liked the premise. I have often wondered how things would be different if I had made different choices. This story explores this idea, in a very interesting way, when a mysterious book suddenly shows up on Doc's desk. Doc and Mercy discover that they are able to see into other people's lives and how their choices affected the present, both for good and bad.
River Jordan has written an interesting book. Her use of description is powerful, and I can still picture Bay City, as well as, Doc and Mercy as I write this review. I would place The Miracle of Mercy Land in the category of fantasy,or magical realism (River Jordan's loose description), although, there isn't magic, as we might define it, in this book. I enjoyed this story, but if you don't like this genre then you may not be interested in this book.
**The Miracle of Mercy Land by River Jordan was provided for me free by WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group in exchange for my honest review.
