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Mercy Unbound Kim Antieau Books

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Mercy Unbound Kim Antieau Books

A timely read for today's chaos. Mercy know she's about to sprout wings and become an angel, thus able to save the world. Her family has other ideas about Mercy's condition. The remedy? Send her to a treatment facility.
The tension between truth and fantasy take the reader on an unforgettable journey into a young woman's opening up to maturity and self-awareness.


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Mercy Unbound Kim Antieau Books Reviews

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.
Mercy is a fifteen year old girl with an eating disorder; she's on the verge of starvation when her parents send her to a treatment facility in New Mexico. But these facts, clearly evident to the reader, allude the patient in question.

Kim Antieau has created an incredible novel narrated by Mercy. Seen through her eyes, her warped, diseased perspective, Mercy is not sick. She doesn't need treatment. Her problem? No one believes what she holds to be true. Mercy is an angel-in-disguise whose wings are always days away from sprouting on her back. She feels the wings itching beneath the surface. She sees the world differently. She feels that once she is an angel she can help people...she could help ease some of the world's pain. As a human, she's useles...but as an angel there's endless possibilities for her to change the world. Food just stands in the way of her destiny. Angels don't eat. And she is almost there. If only people wouldn't pressure her, they would see the truth...

Mercy's breakthrough from almost-insanity to recovery leads the reader on an exciting, realistic journey of the psychological impact of eating disorders.
Mercy can't seem to make her parents understand that her refusal to eat isn't anorexia or bulimia, or any other sort of eating disorder. She simply doesn't need to eat. Because only when she stops eating completely will she finally turn into an angel, and can help correct the world's many problems.

But when her parents ignore her wishes, despite the fact that Mercy claims to feel her wings, and take her to a treatment center, Mercy becomes frightened. The other girls are really sick, and their thoughts and ideas on food scare her, and when tragedy strikes, Mercy's resolutions and beliefs about her condition will be put to the test.

Mercy, Unbound was a peculiar, yet very absorbing read. It neither bashes nor condones eating disorders, but is instead a look at one girl's struggle to overcome the crushing feelings of helplessness as to how to solve the world's many problems. Packed full of pop culture references, allusions to great works of literature, historical facts, and many modern social problems, this is a read for the slightly more mature and well read teen. Despite this fact, story moves fluidly rather than didactically, flitting between Mercy's point of view and her diary entries, making the account of her experience more personal, but also a testament to Antieau's remarkable writing abilities as she seamlessly weaves words together to create a read that will engulf the reader entirely.
This is a great book that is about a young woman with an eating disorder, without being about eating disorders. It's a book about self-discovery, spirituality, compassion, and friendship.
A timely read for today's chaos. Mercy know she's about to sprout wings and become an angel, thus able to save the world. Her family has other ideas about Mercy's condition. The remedy? Send her to a treatment facility.
The tension between truth and fantasy take the reader on an unforgettable journey into a young woman's opening up to maturity and self-awareness.