The Browser: "The Mercy Rule"

Updated: October 6, 2008 - 10:16 AM

A weekly look at new releases.

The Mercy Rule

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The Mercy Rule

By Perri Klass (Houghton Mifflin, 276 pages, $24)

"The Mercy Rule" has the characters to shine as a novel. Lucy Weiss grew up as a foster child, and now she's a pediatrician, working with social services, deciding which moms teetering on the brink of disaster get to keep their kids. This makes for some heartbreaking tales: Athena has nine kids in foster care, the 10th likely to be taken away after blue Kool-Aid is discovered in her baby bottle. Delia has borderline personality disorder and names her kids after the Von Trapp family singers, all while dreaming of being discovered as a star. The most striking characters, though, are Lucy's own children. Preteen Isabel tracks what all the girls are wearing as strictly as she manages every morsel that goes into her mouth. Freddy, especially, plants himself in our hearts. He's in the second grade but still can't manage a belt. He wears sweat pants to school and gets left out of a popular kid's birthday party and obsesses over baseball cards. But despite the characters, the book suffers. Lucy and her husband let us in on inside jokes about the kids' snooty school, but we're not really invited into their lives and minds. The book gets jumbled. Klass abruptly shifts from first-person to third-person narration. Brilliantly crafted characters pop in and pique our interest, and then fade. Dickens is quoted. Family vacations are recounted. Silent-auction items are described. And the book ends, tying up some, but not all, of the loose ends. That's the way Lucy's chaotic world works, of course. It's the way the foster care system works. She tells on moms. She turns them in. And she doesn't always learn how things turn out. But readers want a little more.

HOLLY COLLIER, NEWS COPY EDITOR