MERCY HILL

In this debut novel, a brilliant but controlling, self-absorbed mother raises four daughters on the grounds of a mental hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she’s director of psychiatry.

Youngest daughter Denise Cross reflects from an adult perspective on the complicated upbringing she shared with her older sisters. In 1999, Dr. Lisa Cross is devoted to her daughters, ranging in age from 9-year-old Denise to 13-year-old J.J., with Caro and Mimi in between, but she’s equally devoted to Mercy Hill, which faces a shrinking patient population as deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill becomes widespread. Lisa’s sense of mission combines self-aggrandizement, authoritarianism, and genuine love along with a dollop of altruism. She expects her staff, her daughters, and her husband to think and do exactly what she wants them to. The girls pointedly bear her last name, not that of their easygoing stay-at-home father, Tucker Palmer, and all are desperate to please her. But Lisa’s single-minded drive creates unintended consequences. Lobbying for hospital funding, she goes to extreme lengths that risk her marriage; it’s impossible not to pity poor Tucker. When she sends her unprepared daughters to volunteer inside the hospital, they befriend a patient, with tragic results. She has the girls skip multiple grades at school, ignoring the emotional and psychological costs they pay. Thurman explores the Crosses’ complicated family dynamics within the context of the era and Raleigh’s politics and social norms even when the girls are only semiconscious of the issues. The novel evokes late-20th-century movies about adolescence such as Stand by Me and Now and Then, among others, complete with an epilogue describing who the girls become. Denise’s ironic reference to Little Women also seems apt.

Enjoyable if a bit too comfortably formulaic.