Great Reads for Great Readers

 

Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane.

 

It is Summer, 1974.  In Boston, Massachusetts, a judge has just decreed that public high schools be desegregated:  black teenagers will travel by bus to white high schools – but only in the poorer areas.  Prosperous suburbs with private schools will be exempt.  In the predominantly poor Irish district of Southie racism is rearing its ugly head:  if the rich want desegregation, let them bus all the niggers to their own schools!  The mood is ugly, and there have already been demonstrations, engineered by the local criminals;  they don’t want competition from any nigger gangs on their turf.  The atmosphere is explosive, and the weather is not helping.  Everyone is feeling the heat, not least the mayor, the judicial system, and the police:  something will have to give.

Mary Pat Fennessy is a hard woman – hard-faced, hard to like, and hard-done-by in her personal circumstances:  her first husband, father of her children and a small-time criminal, died in suspicious circumstances;  her beloved son succumbed to heroin’s charms and died as a result;  her second husband Ken has recently left her, and her cherished remaining child, 17 year-old Jules, didn’t come home last night. And a young black man has been found dead overnight in Southie, too, and the police are making a lot of enquires.

 Jules’ mutton-headed boyfriend Rum says that he hasn’t seen her and left her to walk home by herself.  Oh, really?  Rum is unprepared for Mary Pat’s ‘physicality’ when Mary Pat tracks him down, for Mary Pat is a dirty fighter whose main advantage is surprise – surprise and shock that a little woman could turn herself into a bone-breaker, and in Rum’s case, a testicle-cutter – not fatal, you understand, but so painful and bloody that Rum begs the investigating police to keep him in a cell so that she can’t get him – and in return he’ll tell them what he and Jules did on their last date.

Dennis Lehane doesn’t let the reader move an inch away from the page as he holds us all in a stranglehold of suspense, first as to Jules’ fate, then the nature of Mary Pat’s terrible revenge.  And hubble-bubbling away like a dirty underground stream throughout this explosive and powerful story is the racism that never goes away, never changes, and certainly never disappears, even though fifty years have passed.  This was a hard book to read, (including all the f-bombs!) hard because of all the uncomfortable truths that it exposes, especially about how we, as children, are taught to hate:  this is a great book.  SIX STARS.