Mercy Hill

Four sisters grow up fast on the grounds of a state mental institution run by their mother in Thurman’s incisive debut novel. Narrator Denise Cross looks back to 1999, when she was nine and her driven, demanding mother, Lisa, head psychiatrist at “crumbling” Mercy Hill in North Carolina, moved Denise and her three older sisters up two grades by transferring them to a magnet school. Lisa hopes they’ll go on to earn medical degrees and help save the floundering facility, and is desperate to speed up the process. The move, reluctantly assented to by the girls’ increasingly restless stay-at-home dad, works out about as well as might be expected. The four sisters are relentlessly bullied at their new school and cope by getting into trouble. In the summer, Lisa tasks them with helping out in the hospital’s understaffed wards, cleaning up and taking care of residents, and continues putting them to work during the school year. Denise’s scrutiny of her family illuminates several consequential years in their lives, showing how she and her sisters were shaped by their experiences “volunteering” on the wards, and how working for their mother led to tragedy. Throughout, Thurman, who grew up near a similar institution, offers a revealing and nuanced view of the asylum’s social value and the stigma that leads to its downfall. It’s a perceptive take on an unusual childhood. Agent: Robert Guinsler, Sterling Lord Literistic. (May)