Mercy Goodhue
Kern’s novel Mercy Goodhue is a radical departure from her previous offering, Wanting to Be Jackie Kennedy, although both have unforgettable female protagonists. In this case, it is the title character Mercy Goodhue, a sensitive and intelligent young woman in seventeenth century Puritan Massachusetts whose natural sensibilities are affronted by the canting Church beliefs that follow her to the New World in 1630. In her new home she meets a wide array of characters, all wonderfully brought to life by Kern’s narrative skill, characters from famous heretic, Anne Hutchinson, to colony founder, John Winthrop, (a particularly winning rendition of this oft-simplified figure). The patriarch of the infamous Mather clan, and Kern’s standout fictional creation, redoubtable midwife and frontier apothecary Goody Hammer, the rare voice of modern-sounding reason in the otherwise-dark Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The book is fast-paced and very well written, with concise and sometimes poetically powerful descriptions of both the deprivations of colony life and the beauties of the still-unspoiled natural world, and the characters develop in very real-seeming ways.
A very satisfying novel, warmly recommended.
