Book Review: For Mercie's Sake

Title: For Mercie's Sake 

Author: Sharon Srock

Date: 2017

ISBN: 978-1386644644

Publisher: Sharon Srock

Quote: "The idea of attending a Christian high school had given Scottlyn pause."

Why did I not see this book sooner? Traditional publishing tended to trap Christian books in what were called "denominational ghettoes." If you were a Southern Baptist, you wouldn't see books by Freewill Baptists. E-publishing has the potential to change this. 

Anyway, I suspect some readers are getting tired of romance novels for the Sunday Book selections at this web site. Well, this one's not a romance. It's a novella about female empowerment. There are more women than men in the world. Every woman does not and cannot have a husband. Every woman can't rely on some other man to solve problems for her, either. There's a nice man in the story--he makes a cameo appearance in a Sunday School class--but this is a story about what happens when pro-life women decide to get real about, among other things, the fact that the only good man who was close to either one of them has died. 

So a widowed teacher at the Christian school conscientiously takes the emotional risk of apologizing to Scottlyn, who is pregnant as the result of rape, for showing that having a pregnant student in her classroom had given her pause, too. The teacher, Diana, has a nice house with rooms for the children she and her husband never had. Scottlyn is staying in a crowded pro-life shelter, worrying about when the babies are due to arrive and how many of the "preggies" will be able to move into the limited "mommy rooms." Shelter staff have encouraged the single mothers to decorate "Wish Walls," on which Scottlyn happens to have posted a picture of Diana's husband's car. 

As a novel I have to say that literary critics would deduct a few points from this one's grade because it's so short, sweet, and linear, with lots of references to the way both women feel guided by God to adopt each other. Well, it's not really a novel. It's a fictionalized step-by-step manual for those seeking to form "chosen families" to replace broken ones. This is the best-case scenario. The author has written other books about less-than-best cases and put a trailer for one of those at the end of this book. As a first section of a guidebook to how Christians can "choose life" in more effective ways than haranguing parents, I give For Mercie's Sake full marks.