Book Review: Works of Mercy

Works of Mercy by Sally Thomas (Wiseblood Books, 2022).

In the small rural town of Annesville, North Carolina, Kirsty Sain leads a quiet life … so to speak. In fact, as Sally Thomas tells her story in the absorbing new novel Works of Mercy, drawing us steadily into Kirsty’s mind and heart, things feel anything but quiet.

Seen from the outside, the widowed Kirsty lives very simply—regularly cleaning the parish rectory, reluctantly caring for a blind and hairless kitten that’s been given to her, even more reluctantly visiting neighbors in their times of need. But her inner musings show us a sharp, observant woman with a complicated past and an active inner life—a woman with such a compelling presence that it’s no wonder people keep pushing their way into her life, despite her reserve.

Works of Mercy is Thomas’s first novel—she’s chiefly known as a poet—but you’d never know it from her deft handling of character, plot, and description. She weaves Kirsty’s youth in Scotland and England and her present-day life in the U.S. into a seamless whole. Kirsty is still deeply affected by the fallout from a long-ago relationship that derailed her education and sent her fleeing her home in the Shetland Islands. But life goes relentlessly on, and for the sake of others—especially the large and annoying family in her church with the mother who never stops talking—Kirsty has to dig deep and find new ways to meet its demands.

Her eyeless, nameless kitten helps teach her to do this, as it gradually pries open a space in her heart, and Kirsty in turn has to teach Father Schuyler, the gauche new parish priest for whom she cleans. The blind leading the blind leading the blind, you might say. (One of my favorite moments is Father Schuyler’s reaction to meeting the kitten: “There’s a thing in your house. What is it?”)

The kitten’s very ugliness and strangeness symbolize the way the book operates. Works of Mercy defied my expectations at every turn: Every time I thought I knew where things were heading, they went somewhere different. In the wrong hands this material, with its rustic setting and searching explorations of faith, could so easily have ended up in Hallmark movie territory—complete with cute, furry kitten. But this story takes a tougher, bleaker, and ultimately much more satisfying approach. Thomas consistently resists easy answers and tidy reconciliations, and yet through her decidedly non-sentimental novel runs a rich vein of comfort and goodness.

There is such rawness and grace and reality in these characters, at times I felt I was holding, not a book, but a life in my hands. Coming to know Kirsty and those around her, feeling lifted by their redemptive moments and shattered by their tragedies, was an experience I wouldn’t have missed for anything.

(Cover image copyright Wiseblood Books.)

Book Links:

Works of Mercy on Amazon
Works of Mercy at Wiseblood Books

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