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The Shape of Mercy by Susan Meissner

The Shape Of Mercy by Susan Meissner

Meissner's beautifully written story about Mercy Hayworth, a victim of the Salem witch trials, feels so genuine, it will send you straight to Google to find out whether or not Mercy was a real person. But Mercy's isn't the only story here. We walk her path, chronicled in her diary, along with Lauren (Lars) Durough, the wealthy college student aching to stand on her own feet by working for the mysterious Abigail Boyles, Mercy's 83-year-old descendant. The intertwining lives of all three women will quickly capture the reader's curiosity, and questions about assumptions, choices, love, regret, and forgiveness will linger well after the story ends. Highly recommended.

Posted by Cecelia Dowdy. Happy Reading!

CAN Book Feature: White Picket Fences by Susan Meissner

White Picket Fences

By Susan Meissner

October, 2009

• ISBN-10: 1400074576
• ISBN-13: 978-14000-74570

When her black sheep brother disappears, Amanda Janvier eagerly takes in her teenage niece Tally. The girl is practically an orphan: motherless, and living with a father who raises Tally wherever he lands–in a Buick, a pizza joint, a horse farm–and regularly takes off on wild schemes. Amanda envisions that she, her husband Neil, and their two teenagers can offer the girl stability and a shot at a “normal” life, even though their own storybook lives are about to crumble. Seventeen-year-old Chase Janvier hasn’t seen his cousin in years, and other than a vague curiosity about her strange life, he doesn’t expect her arrival will affect him much–or interfere with his growing, disturbing interest in a long-ago house fire that plagues his dreams unbeknownst to anyone else. Tally and Chase bond as they interview two Holocaust survivors for a sociology project, and become startlingly aware that the whole family is grappling with hidden secrets, with the echoes of the past, and with the realization that ignoring tragic situations won’t make them go away. Excerpt here.

Susan Meissner is Right

A funny thing happened a month or so ago. A young woman found my book Watching the Tree Limbs. In a hospital waiting room. You can read the story here. Someone left it behind in a box that said, "Help yourself to a book. Return it or pass it on." So she read it. And it blessed her.

There is beautiful genius behind Susan Meissner's Marshmallow Marketing. Wouldn't it be great fun to place each other's books everywhere? In hospitals. In doctor's offices. In airplanes. In taxicabs. What wonderful stories our books would tell. What travels they would take! And, by God's grace and sovereignty, what lives could be touched.