The most unsettling thing about Mercy Hill by Hannah Thurman is how easily it convinces you that everything happening might, in some warped way, be justified—right up until it isn’t.
Set against the crumbling infrastructure of a state-run psychiatric hospital in North Carolina at the turn of the millennium, Thurman’s debut follows the four Cross sisters—JJ, Caro, Mimi, and Denise—who have grown up on the grounds of Mercy Hill under the rule of their formidable mother, Lisa Cross, head of psychiatry and self-appointed savior of the institution. From the outside, it’s a story about mental healthcare in America and the slow dismantling of public systems. From the inside, it’s something far more intimate and far more disturbing. Because what this novel is really about is a mother who conscripts her children into her life’s work.
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