PAINTING MERCY
In Painting Mercy, the sequel to prize-winning Orla’s Canvas, Orla, now twenty-four, has been studying and painting in New York City. It is 1975. Saigon has fallen to the Communists, and Vietnamese refugees have been invited to settle in New Orleans by Archbishop Hannan, a former paratrooper and military chaplain in WW II. Orla’s childhood friend and forever confidant, Tad Charbonneau, is practicing immigration law in New Orleans, where he mitigates challenging adoption cases involving children, many of them bi-racial, recently airlifted from Saigon and in need of new families. On her way back home for Katie Cowles’ wedding and a summer painting in misspelled St. Suplice, Orla reconnects with Tad and contemplates her future. While she anticipates marriage and family with her undisputed soul mate, she discovers upsetting news about Tad’s sexuality and learns that her forty-three-year-old mother is pregnant. Adding to her troubling personal revelations, Orla becomes involved in the devastating costs of war for former GI and Katie’s brother Denny Cowles and Mercy Cleveland, a Vietnamese orphan who eventually becomes as essential to Orla as her art. Orla once again calls upon her art to make sense of loss and gain. Through her craft she reimagines how Love and Home might look, finally charting a future for herself she had not previously considered possible.
Awards
Testimonials
“Painting Mercy unfolds with an artist’s eye and process. Mary Sharnick’s characters are a testament to the deep and necessary silences creativity requires and how art communicates in unforeseen ways”.
“Painting Mercy is emotionally resonant and a beautifully drawn portrait of complex, all too human characters grappling with the very notions of family, love, and home.”
Mary Sharnick astounds and delights with this sequel to her award-winning depiction of a young artist coming of age in Orla’s Canvas. Now Orla is a young woman and, having completed her college studies she leaves Manhattan and a boyfriend behind to return home for a summer of transformation.
Some of her friends are struggling to escape tragedy. Denny has come back from Viet Nam a decorated but troubled veteran; his sister has a chance to marry up and away from her terrifying childhood. Orla’s best friend Tad is a rising lawyer with a New Orleans law firm, burdened with the responsibility of finding foster homes for 57 Vietnamese children — some of them half-blooded with stateside fathers — brought over as “war orphans”.
Orla’s own transformations, inner, professional, and familial, are fired in a crucible of loss, self-discovery, and sacrifice. The apparent resolution and happy ending of the first book finds a deeper, truer resolution here, in the breath-taking Part 3. (Chapter 25, specifically.) The moments of joy shine through so brightly they might as well illuminate your face as you read.
Sharnick conveys how an artist views the world in terms of colors, forms, and visual metaphors. (My absolute favorite is the one in Chapter 22. That one is just phenomenal!) Her prose sweeps you along, and then hits you right between the eyes, or in the solar plexus, with a remark that is so apt, so completely perfect, that you are stunned, changed. Transformed.
Her characters are achingly real; familiar or strange, their reality is palpable, not contrived. There is the kind priest, whose age is overtaking and shadowing his abilities in a time before words like Dementia were spoken. There’s the art collector who opens more than one door for the talented Orla. There is the Vietnamese child-refugee named Mercy, rendered speechless by her remove. There are parents, neighbors, friends and even enemies, softened by time, sharpened by choice.
Orla’s Canvas shone a light on racism and social class divides. Painting Mercy, set in the summer of 1975, feelingly describes the struggles of that decade. Strongly recommended!
