Saturday, November 19, 2016

Mercer Girls, by Libby Hawker

"Mercer Girls" is loosely based on the first expedition of Asa Mercer to Massachusetts in the last year of the Civil War. Mercer sought to bring back hundreds of young women to tame and marry the "wild" bachelors of the rough and tumble young city of Seattle. He believed that the war had taken so many of the East's young men, that women would be lining up to go with him. Instead, as "Mercer Girls" depicts, only a little more than a dozen signed up.

Rather than unwittingly harm the descendants of Mercer and his Mercer girls, author Libby Hawker created fictional women, with a focus on three: Josephine Carey, the oldest "girl" at 35 with a burdensome secret, Dovey Mason, a 16 year old fleeing an intractable father who wanted to marry her off for the money to save his dying cotton mills, and Sophie Brandt, a young woman wrapped so tightly in her religious beliefs she had driven off all possible suitors. Together they traveled by train to New York City, then by ship to Central America, crossing over by land at Panama, and then, again, traveling by ship to San Francisco and Seattle, arriving in the middle of the night to an empty, dark city. Along the way, they fought terrible illnesses, and weathered boarding houses in various states of disrepair.

Each of the protagonists in Hawker's tale have richly detailed stories as they make their way in the West's brave new world. That their stories intersect with the early days of the suffragette movement is no coincidence. Indeed, Hawker depicts tough-minded Josephine, Susan B. Anthony, and Abigail Scott Duniway, speaking before the Washington State legislature in an early attempt to get the vote for women. (Anthony and Duniway really did so, the first women to do so in the history of the United States. I admit that Hawker's historically accurate usage of the statement "stronger together," a slogan put forward by these early suffragettes, caused me a moment of intense grief because of the events of 2016.)

The world of Mercer and his girls revolved around a vast unsettled nation and a Seattle that had more mud than paved roads, where prostitution was legal, and hard working men and women could become wealthy just through their labor. Hawker does a very good job of interweaving history with her fictional story. "Mercer Girls" is truly historical fiction at its best.

(In return for an honest review, I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.)
Paperback: 430 pages
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing (May 10, 2016)