Reading.is.your.destiny

🏘️🌳📖DEBUT BOOK REVIEW📖🌳🏘️

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🥰 Thank you SO much to @doubledaybooks for the gifted ARC!

📖Title: Mercy Hill
✍️Author: Hannah Thurman
📅Pub Date: May 5, 2026

🏘️I was thrilled to receive an early copy of this! I was initially sold on the cover, the fact that it was a debut, and the synopsis of four sisters growing up on the campus of one of the last state-funded mental hospitals. I’m always interested in sibling stories/family dynamics and the history of mental hospitals has always been fascinating to me as well, so I knew I’d enjoy this!

🌳 The book is told solely from the perspective of one of the daughters, Denise, as she looks back as an adult and reflects on her time spent growing up at the hospital and how it affected her and her siblings. I was fascinated by all four of the sisters, but especially by her mom who served as the head of psychiatry at the hospital. I expected this book to primarily focus on the patients and heavily involve them, but it mostly focused on Denise’s family and the hospital setting was more background.

📖 I enjoyed how this was a coming-of-age story in a way, but that it also had Denise’s adult thoughts as well. So much of what she went through would be interpreted differently through the eyes of a child than as an adult looking back on it. It was hard to watch her present day reactions when she had realizations of things that had happened to her as a child, but I think this storytelling method was so beneficial in sharing the full picture.

🏘️ I’m so excited for Hannah’s fresh voice in literary fiction. Her writing reminded me of Jean Hanff Korelitz, Claire Lombardi and Mary Beth Keane. If you enjoy those authors’ works, I think you would absolutely love this story!

🌳 This book propelled me to do a whole deep dive into the closing of these hospitals, the last one that existed, etc. and I found it all to be so interesting!

❓What was the last book that had you researching while reading?