Jul 7, 2021
MERCURY BOYS
by Chandra Prasad
(Soho Teen, 8/3/21)
9781641292658
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seen from United States
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seen from China
MERCURY BOYS
by Chandra Prasad
(Soho Teen, 8/3/21)
9781641292658
.
Add to Goodreads
Purchase from Bookshop
Title: Mercury Boys Author: Chandra Prasad Genres: Contemporary, Fantasy, Historical Fiction (kind of) Pages: 360 Publisher: Soho Teen Review Copy: Received an ARC from the publisher Availability: Available now
Summary: After her life is upended by divorce and a cross-country move, 16-year-old Saskia Brown feels like an outsider at her new school—not only is she a transplant, she’s biracial in a population of mostly white students. One day while visiting her only friend at her part-time library job, Saskia encounters a vial of liquid mercury, then touches an old daguerreotype—the precursor of the modern-day photograph—and makes a startling discovery. She is somehow able to visit the man in the portrait: Robert Cornelius, a brilliant young inventor from the nineteenth century. The hitch: she can see him only in her dreams.
Saskia shares her revelation with some classmates, hoping to find connection and friendship among strangers. Under her guidance, the other girls steal portraits of young men from a local college's daguerreotype collection and try the dangerous experiment for themselves. Soon, they each form a bond with their own "Mercury Boy," from an injured Union soldier to a charming pickpocket in New York City.
At night, the girls visit the boys in their dreams. During the day, they hold clandestine meetings of their new secret society. At first, the Mercury Boys Club is a thrilling diversion from their troubled everyday lives, but it's not long before jealousy, violence, and secrets threaten everything the girls hold dear.
Review: [This book contains graphic depictions of gore/wounds, amputation, drug and alcohol use (including overdose), near drowning, racism, divorce & infidelity, and cult-like behavior.]
The summary for MERCURY BOYS intrigued me immediately. I love stories with fantastical elements and am fond of history, so the premise of time travel via daguerreotype caught my attention. However, I didn’t quite get what I wanted from this book, and the mismatch between my expectations going in and how the story ultimately turned out left me a little disappointed.
There is a lot going on in MERCURY BOYS. Beyond everything mentioned in the summary, Saskia also has additional side plots involving a hookup she regrets, sorting out her relationship with each of her parents, etc. Building a new life in a new town after your mother cheats on your father and your parents get divorced and you have an ill-advised hookup with a cute boy would be enough for a novel on its own. Add in everything else, including occasionally swapping POVs so you can see what the other girls are doing with their “Mercury Boys,” and 360 pages simply isn’t enough to develop everything meaningfully. In my opinion, the book suffers for it. I won’t go into spoiler territory, but the final revelation in the book is motivated by something I honestly didn’t care about at all. This soured my enjoyment of the book considerably.
Another thing that suffered is the development of the Mercury Boys themselves. Even though the book jumps out of Saskia’s POV to see some of the other time travel trips, there simply isn’t enough time to develop the Mercury Boys to the point where I would see why any of the girls would get so obsessed with them. Granted, some of this was certainly deliberate for spoilery plot reasons, but I picked up this book because I wanted to see these girls—or at least Saskia—form the kind of bond with their Mercury Boys that would be worth the “jealousy, violence, and secrets” the summary promised me. None of them managed that, in my opinion.
Recommendation: Borrow it someday. There are a lot of good ideas in MERCURY BOYS, but too few of those ideas are given the space they need to develop properly. Ultimately, I picked up MERCURY BOYS expecting one kind of story, only to have my expectations subverted in a way that disappointed and frustrated me.
Extras:
Books Remind Us We Are All Time Travelers by Chandra Prasad, author of Mercury Boys
Indian-American author explores multiracialism and visiting the dead in her new YA novel
Who runs the (fantasy) world? GIRLS.
Today we’re celebrating some of our favorite female characters who are ruling in their dangerous and dark fantasy worlds!
Strong leaders, dangerous assassins, determined and powerful magic-users...these YA books have got it all.
Kestra from The Traitor’s Game
Kestra doesn’t back down from anything - not exile, not being kidnapped, and not enemy forces conspiring to take her down.
Evelayn from Dark Breaks the Dawn
Evelayn has just come into massive amounts of power, but that’s not the only thing that helps her succeed in her war-torn world. She’s got to rely on her cunning and deception to stop the world from falling to darkness.
Nadia from The Forgetting
Every 12 years in Nadia’s world, everyone loses their memories--but she is the only one who has never forgotten. She uses this power to uncover mysteries in the city of Canaan and go on a quest for the truth.
Gwen from Everland
Gwen lives in a London destroyed by bombs and disease, where the only survivors are children and danger lurks around every corner. She has to scavenge to survive and protect her siblings - but must set off across the city to save her sister, no matter the cost.
Sam from Damselfly
Sam is stranded on an island reminiscent of Lord of the Flies, but her fellow students aren’t the only danger here - there’s also a dark and mysterious presence in the jungle that taunts them at every turn.
Book Review: "Damselfly" by Chandra Prasad - http://blog.mugglenet.com/2018/03/book-review-damselfly-by-chandra-prasad/
Title: Damselfly Author: Chandra Prasad Genres: Adventure, Contemporary Pages: 240 Publisher: Scholastic Press Review Copy: Book received from publisher Availability: Available now
Summary: In the wake of crash-landing on a deserted tropical island, a group of private-school teens must rely on their wits and one another to survive.
Having just survived a plane crash, Samantha Mishra finds herself isolated and injured in the thick of the jungle. She has no idea where she is or where anybody else is — she doesn’t even know if anybody else is alive. Once Sam connects with her best friend, Mel, and they locate the others, they set up camp and hope for rescue. But as the days pass, the survivors, all teammates on the Drake Rosemont fencing team, realize that they’re on their own — with the exception of a mysterious presence who taunts and threatens them. When their initial attempts to escape the island fail, the teens find they need to survive more than the jungle . . . they need to survive each other.
This taut novel, with a setting evocative of Lord of the Flies, is by turns cinematic and intimate, and always thought-provoking.
Review: This book includes self-harm, suicide attempts, body horror, eating disorders, domestic violence, drug abuse, (accidental) death, and murder. This review will spoil a character’s death.
I haven’t read Lord of the Flies since my sophomore year of high school, so my memories are exceptionally fuzzy. There are certainly references and homages I missed in Chandra Prasad’s Damselfly because of it, though with one notable exception, missing out won’t impact your reading much. I certainly liked Damselfly more than Lord of the Flies, and that’s largely due to Sam as our narrator. All of her memories/flashbacks to the time before the island allowed her and Mel (and even Rittika) to take on a personal depth I don’t remember any of the Lord of the Flies boys actually reaching.
Sam is particularly interesting—it’s not often a survival story is told from the point-of-view of a leader’s main support instead of the leader. Sam’s position is often as an observer or as someone caught between supporting her friend and craving recognition from other people. That push and pull, how easily Sam can be swayed, how she fumbles to figure out what her own boundaries are, are all great ways for Sam to discover her own faults and be honest (at least with herself) about them. That all provides a great contrast with Rittika and Mel, who are far more confident but on polar opposite sides.
But outside of those three (and Alexa, in Sam’s memories), most of the characters are incredibly flat. In fact, the boys appear to have made such a limited impression on the internet as a whole that I didn’t even realize there were going to be boys on the island. I do appreciate that Prasad diversified the cast and tackled race and class issues that would crop up at a predominantly white, exclusive private high school and between different cast members. I don’t like how everything was handled, but it was refreshing to see it addressed head on.
There is one thing I want to note that I would love to hear mentally ill readers’ opinions on. There are two mentally ill characters in Damselfly. Sam’s sister Alexa is one of them, and her character is granted a great deal of depth and screen time. What concerned me is the portrayal of the second mentally ill character, whose screen time is largely focused on the way she changes as she no longer has access to her medications, gets viciously bullied over it, and ends up dying as a direct result of her mental illness in a scene that struck me as far too close to “pretty dead girl.” I’m not equipped to talk about it further, but it’s something I thought should be pointed out.
Recommendation: If you’re a fan of Lord of the Flies, Prasad’s Damselfly is sure to intrigue you with its deconstruction and broadening of the original story. Damselfly is a quick read, though it suffers from how few characters are truly fleshed out. I quite enjoyed the ending, though I’m certain it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Otherwise, borrow it someday.
Extras
“Why Teachers Pair Classics with ‘Linked’ Young Adult Texts in the Classroom.”
“Author Chat with Chandra Prasad” at YA Books Central
“Why I Choose to Write Multiracial Characters” at TeenReads.com
Happy book birthday to Chandra Prasad for her spectacular new novel, DAMSELFLY! 🎉🎉🎉
Get Ready YALLFest—@IreadYA Is Coming For You!
YALLFest is this weekend and we couldn’t be more excited to be headed to Charleston to meet-up with all of the book nerds coming out to this year’s festival! Time to break out the happy dance!
This Saturday, November 11, hang out with @IreadYA for special events and loads of giveaways at our booth ALL DAY LONG! See our booth schedule below and make sure to have multiple tote bags handy—you’re going to need them ;)
Books I've read (so far) in 2019:
"Damselfly" - Chandra Prasad