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Mercy Hill: A Novel
A debut family novel about four sisters growing up on the campus of the underfunded state mental hospital where their strong-willed mother serves as head of psychiatry. A richly moving story of sisterhood, loyalty, and mental health in America.
The Cross sisters have lived their entire lives on the sprawling grounds of Mercy Hill, the embattled Raleigh mental hospital run by their formidable mother. Since childhood, JJ, Caro, Mimi, and Denise have been inculcated with their mother's they'll work alongside her to protect Mercy Hill from the fate of other state hospitals across the country, which are being gutted and closed, one by one.
After an incident involving the highest-security ward, Mercy Hill faces greater scrutiny than ever, and Lisa Cross pushes each of her daughters even harder in the name of her mission. As the sisters cross into adulthood, the pressures of their isolated environment and mercurial mother set them on different—and perilous—paths. And as the battle wages on, youngest sister and narrator Denise grapples with the added responsibility that comes from being the last hope for their mother’s dreams.
Set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with Mercy Hill’s fate hanging in the balance, Denise recounts the transformations that shape and destroy her family, along with the landscape of mental healthcare in the United States. With sharp insight and real humor, debut novelist Hannah Thurman captures the turmoil of growing up, the true meaning of a calling, and the indelible bonds of family.
The Cross sisters have lived their entire lives on the sprawling grounds of Mercy Hill, the embattled Raleigh mental hospital run by their formidable mother. Since childhood, JJ, Caro, Mimi, and Denise have been inculcated with their mother's they'll work alongside her to protect Mercy Hill from the fate of other state hospitals across the country, which are being gutted and closed, one by one.
After an incident involving the highest-security ward, Mercy Hill faces greater scrutiny than ever, and Lisa Cross pushes each of her daughters even harder in the name of her mission. As the sisters cross into adulthood, the pressures of their isolated environment and mercurial mother set them on different—and perilous—paths. And as the battle wages on, youngest sister and narrator Denise grapples with the added responsibility that comes from being the last hope for their mother’s dreams.
Set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with Mercy Hill’s fate hanging in the balance, Denise recounts the transformations that shape and destroy her family, along with the landscape of mental healthcare in the United States. With sharp insight and real humor, debut novelist Hannah Thurman captures the turmoil of growing up, the true meaning of a calling, and the indelible bonds of family.
Audible Audio
First published May 5, 2026
About the author
Hannah Thurman
1 book49 followersHannah Thurman is a Brooklyn-based writer originally from Raleigh, NC whose fiction has been published widely. In 2024 she was named a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Fiction. Winner of the 2023 Florida Review Editor's Prize, she's been chosen for conferences/residencies at Bread Loaf, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, VCCA, and Yaddo.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 146 reviews
April 26, 2026
I really enjoyed it but found the ending abrupt. This is a character driven story of a family and I think there was so much that I enjoyed. The writing was beautiful. Lisa Cross- complex but couldn’t help but love her.
May 29, 2026
Four sisters, one impossible mother, and mental health in America.
4.5 stars rounded up.
For any reader with a permanent soft spot for stories about sisters - especially the messy, emotionally layered kind found in Little Women or the more recent Blue Sisters - Mercy Hill, Hannah Thurman's debut novel, will likely feel immensely satisfying.
Told through the eyes of Denise Cross, the youngest of four sisters - nine years old at the outset of the novel in 1999 - this remarkable debut follows a family raised on the grounds of Mercy Hill, a struggling state psychiatric hospital in North Carolina reminiscent of the now-defunct Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, where the author herself grew up and where her mother my worked briefly as a speech therapist. Run by the sisters' brilliant, domineering mother, Lisa Cross, the hospital is more than her workplace; it is her mission, her identity, and the axis around which the entire family is expected to revolve.
Growing up in the shadow of both Mercy Hill and their mother leaves deep marks on each of the sisters, though each responds differently. One rebels. One disappears into religion. One struggles under the weight of her own mental health. And Denise, desperate for approval and connection, tries her hardest to become the daughter her mother wants her to be. What Thurman captures so beautifully is that none of these responses feel exaggerated or simplistic. Every sister feels fully realized and is treated with enormous compassion.
The novel is as much about family as it is about the state of mental healthcare in America, particularly during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when institutions like Mercy Hill were increasingly underfunded, scrutinized, and abandoned. But despite those larger systemic themes, the book never loses sight of the emotional core at its center: four sisters trying to survive the same childhood in very different ways.
What impressed me most was how the novel handles difficult subject matter, especially complicated family dynamics. There is pain here, but also humor, tenderness, loyalty, and moments of genuine grace. Combined with a resilient protagonist you cannot help but root for and beautiful, lyrical writing, it all adds up to a book that became impossible to put down.
Beautifully written and rich with emotional insight, Mercy Hill is a moving, character-driven portrait of sisterhood, sacrifice, ambition, and the complicated ways we inherit both trauma and love. Both thoughtful and thought-provoking, this compassionate coming-of-age story is an enormously impressive debut full of heart. Hannah Thurman is absolutely an author to watch.
Many thanks to Doubleday Books | Doubleday for providing me with an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
"Mercy Hill" was published on May 5, 2026, and is available now.
4.5 stars rounded up.
For any reader with a permanent soft spot for stories about sisters - especially the messy, emotionally layered kind found in Little Women or the more recent Blue Sisters - Mercy Hill, Hannah Thurman's debut novel, will likely feel immensely satisfying.
Told through the eyes of Denise Cross, the youngest of four sisters - nine years old at the outset of the novel in 1999 - this remarkable debut follows a family raised on the grounds of Mercy Hill, a struggling state psychiatric hospital in North Carolina reminiscent of the now-defunct Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, where the author herself grew up and where her mother my worked briefly as a speech therapist. Run by the sisters' brilliant, domineering mother, Lisa Cross, the hospital is more than her workplace; it is her mission, her identity, and the axis around which the entire family is expected to revolve.
Growing up in the shadow of both Mercy Hill and their mother leaves deep marks on each of the sisters, though each responds differently. One rebels. One disappears into religion. One struggles under the weight of her own mental health. And Denise, desperate for approval and connection, tries her hardest to become the daughter her mother wants her to be. What Thurman captures so beautifully is that none of these responses feel exaggerated or simplistic. Every sister feels fully realized and is treated with enormous compassion.
The novel is as much about family as it is about the state of mental healthcare in America, particularly during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when institutions like Mercy Hill were increasingly underfunded, scrutinized, and abandoned. But despite those larger systemic themes, the book never loses sight of the emotional core at its center: four sisters trying to survive the same childhood in very different ways.
What impressed me most was how the novel handles difficult subject matter, especially complicated family dynamics. There is pain here, but also humor, tenderness, loyalty, and moments of genuine grace. Combined with a resilient protagonist you cannot help but root for and beautiful, lyrical writing, it all adds up to a book that became impossible to put down.
Beautifully written and rich with emotional insight, Mercy Hill is a moving, character-driven portrait of sisterhood, sacrifice, ambition, and the complicated ways we inherit both trauma and love. Both thoughtful and thought-provoking, this compassionate coming-of-age story is an enormously impressive debut full of heart. Hannah Thurman is absolutely an author to watch.
Many thanks to Doubleday Books | Doubleday for providing me with an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
"Mercy Hill" was published on May 5, 2026, and is available now.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Highly enjoyable! I really loved this story, the characters and the ending. So satisfying and well written. I look forward to more from this author!
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC to review.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC to review.
September 29, 2025
Mercy Hill by Hannah Therman will be one of my favorite books for 2025, without doubt. It's far from what I was expecting and far better than I had hoped.
The book is set in a small home on the grounds of a state hospital for the criminally insane. It also houses other patients who are in need of care due to mental disabilities. Obviously, maybe, this isn't set in the present but, rather, in the not too far past. I remember these facilities so not too far at all.
The administrator of the hospital is a mother of three girls whom she pushes to accelerate their learning. They are quite capable intellectually of this rapid pace but are they psychologically ready to be pushed several years ahead of where they peers are placed? (If they were homeschooled, yes, but the mother keeps them in school for some reason.) The mother is desperate for the hospital to remain open at a time when others are being shuttered and will do ANYTHING to keep its doors open, including putting her own daughters - well below age - to work as volunteers. There are disastrous results, of course, for the hospital and the family and we see the effects of this as we slowly watch each of the three daughters age and mature through the process of handling the maternal expectations placed on them and on each other.
This is a harrowing, emotional tale, told from the viewpoint of the youngest daughter but it's also a beautiful story. It doesn't have a "happy" ending but it does have a realistic one and I greatly appreciated that. I highly recommend this book for mature readers who will appreciate its nuances.
The book is set in a small home on the grounds of a state hospital for the criminally insane. It also houses other patients who are in need of care due to mental disabilities. Obviously, maybe, this isn't set in the present but, rather, in the not too far past. I remember these facilities so not too far at all.
The administrator of the hospital is a mother of three girls whom she pushes to accelerate their learning. They are quite capable intellectually of this rapid pace but are they psychologically ready to be pushed several years ahead of where they peers are placed? (If they were homeschooled, yes, but the mother keeps them in school for some reason.) The mother is desperate for the hospital to remain open at a time when others are being shuttered and will do ANYTHING to keep its doors open, including putting her own daughters - well below age - to work as volunteers. There are disastrous results, of course, for the hospital and the family and we see the effects of this as we slowly watch each of the three daughters age and mature through the process of handling the maternal expectations placed on them and on each other.
This is a harrowing, emotional tale, told from the viewpoint of the youngest daughter but it's also a beautiful story. It doesn't have a "happy" ending but it does have a realistic one and I greatly appreciated that. I highly recommend this book for mature readers who will appreciate its nuances.
April 11, 2026
MERCY HILL
by Hannah Thurman
A character-driven debut that really leans into family dynamics and the lasting impact of a presumptuous and overbearing parent.
What stood out most to me was Lisa. She’s a formidable, overwhelming presence who casts a shadow over her entire family. As head of psychiatry, she is completely devoted to keeping Mercy Hill open, but at a real emotional cost to her family. Her determination is admirable, but also uncomfortable, especially in how strongly she pushes her own ambitions onto her four daughters. There is a quiet absence in the father—he loves his daughters and wants what is best for them, but I found him more passive than I expected. That tension is what drives the story.
I liked that the story is told through Denise looking back, as it adds a reflective, slightly haunting tone. You really feel how growing up around the hospital—and under their mother’s expectations—forces the sisters to mature quickly and shapes who they become.
The setting itself is also interesting and adds to the atmosphere, especially as the future of Mercy Hill becomes uncertain. The “troubling incident” brings everything into sharper focus, but for me, this book was less about the event and more about the emotional ripple effects within the family.
Overall, this is a thoughtful, character-focused read about ambition, control, and identity. If you enjoy stories that explore complicated family relationships, this one is worth picking up. I was impressed that this is a debut, and I’m definitely interested to see what Hannah Thurman writes next.
Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for the eARC.
by Hannah Thurman
A character-driven debut that really leans into family dynamics and the lasting impact of a presumptuous and overbearing parent.
What stood out most to me was Lisa. She’s a formidable, overwhelming presence who casts a shadow over her entire family. As head of psychiatry, she is completely devoted to keeping Mercy Hill open, but at a real emotional cost to her family. Her determination is admirable, but also uncomfortable, especially in how strongly she pushes her own ambitions onto her four daughters. There is a quiet absence in the father—he loves his daughters and wants what is best for them, but I found him more passive than I expected. That tension is what drives the story.
I liked that the story is told through Denise looking back, as it adds a reflective, slightly haunting tone. You really feel how growing up around the hospital—and under their mother’s expectations—forces the sisters to mature quickly and shapes who they become.
The setting itself is also interesting and adds to the atmosphere, especially as the future of Mercy Hill becomes uncertain. The “troubling incident” brings everything into sharper focus, but for me, this book was less about the event and more about the emotional ripple effects within the family.
Overall, this is a thoughtful, character-focused read about ambition, control, and identity. If you enjoy stories that explore complicated family relationships, this one is worth picking up. I was impressed that this is a debut, and I’m definitely interested to see what Hannah Thurman writes next.
Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for the eARC.
May 5, 2026
4 stars. Thurman’s coming-of-age debut is quite unique as it’s set at an underfunded state mental hospital, and follows four daughters raised up in the late 90’s-early 2000’s on the hospital grounds where their mother is head of psychiatry. Told in the youngest daughter’s voice, you learn their mother is super controlling about anything hospital related and pushes her own ambitions on her girls. You can’t help feel for them growing up in those unusual circumstances, and their father is no help as he is passively absent considering his wife’s strong-willed nature. So of course this shapes what they do and who they become. I love a good character-drawn novel + anything about sisterhood, and also Thurman’s creativity of a very unexpected family dynamic + setting. A really great debut. Would read more from her. 📖🎧 Pub. 5/5/26
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc in exchange for an honest review.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc in exchange for an honest review.
May 25, 2026
FINAL REVIEW:
I loved this so much. This is a character driven book! It’s about a family of four young sisters, their mom and father who live on psychiatric hospital grounds. This was common back then. This took place in the 1990s to early 2000s when deinstitutionalization was common. This really touched at my core because I have been a psychiatric RN for many years. This subject is very close to my heart and I have strong opinions on it.
The four young girls JJ, Caro, Mimi and Denise have a very believable & interesting relationship with each other and their parents. She writes very believable characters. Each with a very distinct personality. I also saw great changes with all of them both good
And bad. Their mother is the head psychiatrist at the hospital and a very intelligent strong woman. This is tough for the girls as she’s constantly pushing them to do more and better. My mother was this way I get that.
The hospital itself was a character and was very real to me. At times I found the book to be humorous.
It is told from a first person perspective of Denise, the youngest child. This really works and made it all very interesting. Seeing some of the family dysfunction through her eyes made it so raw.
It’s hard to believe this is her debut novel. It was truly wonderful and I cannot wait to read her next book!!
Initial review:
Yes: A book I borrowed from the library to try before I buy (tired buying hundreds books and hating half)
I read first ch or more -first 10-100 pages skim around at times. I read many of my GR friend’s reviews. This is what I did and didn’t like:
Love this cover. I work at a psy hospital. So I love this subject!!!
I started reading it and it sounds fascinating!
Amazon $29 ouch
Oh Richard Russo & Claire Lombardo love this!!
I loved this so much. This is a character driven book! It’s about a family of four young sisters, their mom and father who live on psychiatric hospital grounds. This was common back then. This took place in the 1990s to early 2000s when deinstitutionalization was common. This really touched at my core because I have been a psychiatric RN for many years. This subject is very close to my heart and I have strong opinions on it.
The four young girls JJ, Caro, Mimi and Denise have a very believable & interesting relationship with each other and their parents. She writes very believable characters. Each with a very distinct personality. I also saw great changes with all of them both good
And bad. Their mother is the head psychiatrist at the hospital and a very intelligent strong woman. This is tough for the girls as she’s constantly pushing them to do more and better. My mother was this way I get that.
The hospital itself was a character and was very real to me. At times I found the book to be humorous.
It is told from a first person perspective of Denise, the youngest child. This really works and made it all very interesting. Seeing some of the family dysfunction through her eyes made it so raw.
It’s hard to believe this is her debut novel. It was truly wonderful and I cannot wait to read her next book!!
Initial review:
Yes: A book I borrowed from the library to try before I buy (tired buying hundreds books and hating half)
I read first ch or more -first 10-100 pages skim around at times. I read many of my GR friend’s reviews. This is what I did and didn’t like:
Love this cover. I work at a psy hospital. So I love this subject!!!
I started reading it and it sounds fascinating!
Amazon $29 ouch
Oh Richard Russo & Claire Lombardo love this!!
May 14, 2026
Well what started out to be a promising story, it sure did end up being one of the most anticlimactic books I’ve ever read. Womp womp.
May 13, 2026
I could hardly put this one down but was wholly underwhelmed by it. Still love a debut novel but confused about this one
April 1, 2026
After seeing so many books with the same recycled plotlines over and over again, it was so refreshing to find this absolute gem.
This original debut novel takes place in the late 90’s/2000’s centering around the Cross family: Lisa and Tucker, and their four daughters, JJ, Mimi, Caro, and Denise. It’s told from Denise’s perspective (the youngest child). They live in a cottage in Raleigh, NC on a large property of a mental hospital where the mother Lisa works as the head of psychiatry. This unconventional lifestyle makes for a very interesting plot that I was gripped to from the very beginning.
I can’t say enough about the quality of the writing- it’s literal PERFECTION. The characters are amazing, the character development is fantastic, and the setting of this book is a fascinating character in of itself. I absolutely loved every single word of this story and ripped through it in 24 hours. It’s definitely on my list of top 10 books of 2026. Even though I’m not originally from Raleigh, it’s where I now call home, and it made my connection to this book that much stronger. I’ll have a major book hangover from this one for a long time. The author (originally from Raleigh) is visiting my local bookstore soon, and I can’t wait to hear her discuss this unforgettable novel.
*Thank you @netgalley and @doubledaybooks for this advanced reader copy. Mercy Hill hits bookshelves on May 5!
This original debut novel takes place in the late 90’s/2000’s centering around the Cross family: Lisa and Tucker, and their four daughters, JJ, Mimi, Caro, and Denise. It’s told from Denise’s perspective (the youngest child). They live in a cottage in Raleigh, NC on a large property of a mental hospital where the mother Lisa works as the head of psychiatry. This unconventional lifestyle makes for a very interesting plot that I was gripped to from the very beginning.
I can’t say enough about the quality of the writing- it’s literal PERFECTION. The characters are amazing, the character development is fantastic, and the setting of this book is a fascinating character in of itself. I absolutely loved every single word of this story and ripped through it in 24 hours. It’s definitely on my list of top 10 books of 2026. Even though I’m not originally from Raleigh, it’s where I now call home, and it made my connection to this book that much stronger. I’ll have a major book hangover from this one for a long time. The author (originally from Raleigh) is visiting my local bookstore soon, and I can’t wait to hear her discuss this unforgettable novel.
*Thank you @netgalley and @doubledaybooks for this advanced reader copy. Mercy Hill hits bookshelves on May 5!
September 4, 2025
I found the plot of this book very interesting. With relatable themes of family bonds and mental health, the time period this took place in was interesting but these themes are still relevant in today’s world. I was fascinated by the sisters’ personalities and the toll of isolation. psychiatry. A richly moving story of sisterhood, loyalty, and mental health in America. The writing was so well done in this book. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This coming of age book takes place in a residential mental institution where a driven psychiatrist's children grow up and learn about the world. On a personal level, it deals with how such an unusual, isolated setting as well as such a unbending, driven mother, affects the experiences and development of the children (a group of sisters) and the dynamics of the family. On a political level, it deals with the movement toward deinstitutionalization of mental health care over time. Thurman does her best descriptive writing as she paints a picture of the facility and some of its inhabitants. Although the hospital and its campus are near to Raleigh, NC, and the family does some politically motivated traveling, those details are blurred as they accentuate the importance of the facility through contrast to the clarity with which it is portrayed.
The story is told from the youngest child's (Denise's) perspective. She is so young and naive for much of that story that she offers observations but not insight. Her mother, the psychiatrist heading up the facility and fighting for its life, remains an enigma. There is very little sense of the characters motivations, other than the broad political one of keeping the facility open. The split between the mother and father seems like an unexpected discontinuity given their roles in the marriage. This is the downside of assuming a young child's perspective as a frame for the character development.
The central theme of the novel deals with mental health deinstitutionalization. Along the way, the author asks the reader to consider and question corporate greed, personal ambition vs. the needs of a family, and teenage pedophiles, among other things. There is a lot to think about in this book, and a lot to discuss. These themes suggest a depth that doesn't actually infuse the book. The book is surprising in that it seems to skim these topics without asking the reader to carry their weight. Again, this may be because this take on mental illness is viewed from a child's perspective.
Because of that child's eye view, the writing skirts around the edges of the reality of mental health issues, making the book an easy read but one that is perhaps not as rewarding or memorable as the topic might suggest. It's a straightforward, eyes-wide-open sort of perspective that is somewhat lacking in nuance.
This book takes an interesting and unique time in our history and makes the political movement toward deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill more personally accessible. It does so by employing the straightforward wide-eyed perspective of a child. In doing so, however, it loses some depth. Some of that depth could have been brought to the book through more nuanced characterization and perhaps multiple perspectives.
The story is told from the youngest child's (Denise's) perspective. She is so young and naive for much of that story that she offers observations but not insight. Her mother, the psychiatrist heading up the facility and fighting for its life, remains an enigma. There is very little sense of the characters motivations, other than the broad political one of keeping the facility open. The split between the mother and father seems like an unexpected discontinuity given their roles in the marriage. This is the downside of assuming a young child's perspective as a frame for the character development.
The central theme of the novel deals with mental health deinstitutionalization. Along the way, the author asks the reader to consider and question corporate greed, personal ambition vs. the needs of a family, and teenage pedophiles, among other things. There is a lot to think about in this book, and a lot to discuss. These themes suggest a depth that doesn't actually infuse the book. The book is surprising in that it seems to skim these topics without asking the reader to carry their weight. Again, this may be because this take on mental illness is viewed from a child's perspective.
Because of that child's eye view, the writing skirts around the edges of the reality of mental health issues, making the book an easy read but one that is perhaps not as rewarding or memorable as the topic might suggest. It's a straightforward, eyes-wide-open sort of perspective that is somewhat lacking in nuance.
This book takes an interesting and unique time in our history and makes the political movement toward deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill more personally accessible. It does so by employing the straightforward wide-eyed perspective of a child. In doing so, however, it loses some depth. Some of that depth could have been brought to the book through more nuanced characterization and perhaps multiple perspectives.
October 18, 2025
For me, this missed the mark. I think there was an opportunity here to further explore the deinstitutionalization of mental health, but it only partially addressed that. It also tried to be a sweeping family drama, but all the characters just seemed like that--characterizations. No character really had any depth. I probably would have DNR'd it, but since it was an ARC I felt I needed to finish it. It was pretty underwhelming, not very compelling, and generally the writing was sup-par. I'm giving it two stars for trying, but I wouldn't recommend it.
May 7, 2026
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Thank you to Doubleday and NetGalley for the ebook copy of Mercy Hill by Hannah Thurman.
📝 Short Summary
Growing up on the grounds of the struggling Mercy Hill state mental hospital, the Cross sisters are raised under the intense expectations of their brilliant and demanding mother, who is determined to save the hospital at any cost. As the sisters move into adulthood, the pressure of family loyalty, mental health realities, and life inside Mercy Hill begins shaping each of them in very different ways.
💭 Review
I honestly ended up enjoying this book a lot more than I expected to.
What immediately stood out to me was the setting because growing up on the grounds of a state mental hospital already creates such a unique atmosphere for a family story. Mercy Hill itself feels almost like another family member throughout the book. It’s falling apart, underfunded, emotionally heavy, and filled with tension, but it also becomes home for these sisters in a way that deeply shapes who they become.
This book is definitely more character driven and emotional than plot heavy, but that really worked for me here because the relationships between the sisters and their mother carried so much weight. The story slowly unfolds through Denise’s perspective, and I loved how reflective and personal the narration felt. There’s this lingering sadness underneath everything because you can feel how much these girls grew up carrying responsibilities and emotional pressure that should never have belonged to children.
The mother, Lisa Cross, was honestly one of the most fascinating parts of the story for me because she’s so complicated. She’s passionate, intelligent, determined, controlling, exhausting, and deeply flawed all at once. You can tell she genuinely believes in her mission to save Mercy Hill and protect mental healthcare, but at the same time, her obsession with that mission affects her daughters in ways that become increasingly painful as they get older.
And honestly, that was one of the strongest parts of the book for me overall: watching how growing up in that environment shaped each sister differently. Some cling tightly to the family mission, some try to escape it completely, and others get emotionally trapped somewhere in the middle. The story captures that feeling of siblings surviving the same childhood but carrying entirely different emotional scars from it.
I also thought the book handled mental healthcare and institutional decline in America in a really interesting way. Mercy Hill is constantly under threat, constantly lacking resources, constantly fighting to survive, and you can feel the frustration, hopelessness, and pressure surrounding everyone connected to it. The hospital becomes symbolic of so many things throughout the story: duty, sacrifice, identity, generational pressure, and even emotional entrapment.
At the same time, this never felt overly heavy or emotionally unbearable because there’s also warmth, humor, sisterhood, and genuine love running through the story too. The relationships between the sisters felt believable to me because they’re messy, protective, resentful, loyal, and deeply connected in ways only sisters can really understand.
I also loved the late 90s and early 2000s atmosphere woven throughout the story because it grounded everything in this very specific emotional era without making it feel gimmicky. It added another layer of nostalgia and realism to the family dynamics.
This is definitely one of those quieter literary family dramas where the emotional unraveling matters more than huge shocking twists, but I found myself really invested in the characters and the emotional tension inside the family. By the end, I genuinely cared about these sisters and what Mercy Hill represented to all of them.
For me, this ended up being such a thoughtful, emotional story about family loyalty, identity, sisterhood, mental healthcare, and the complicated ways parents shape their children without always realizing the damage they leave behind.
✅ Would I Recommend It?
Absolutely if you enjoy literary family dramas, sister stories, emotionally layered character driven books, complicated mother daughter relationships, and stories exploring mental healthcare, identity, and family pressure.
Thank you to Doubleday and NetGalley for the ebook copy of Mercy Hill by Hannah Thurman.
📝 Short Summary
Growing up on the grounds of the struggling Mercy Hill state mental hospital, the Cross sisters are raised under the intense expectations of their brilliant and demanding mother, who is determined to save the hospital at any cost. As the sisters move into adulthood, the pressure of family loyalty, mental health realities, and life inside Mercy Hill begins shaping each of them in very different ways.
💭 Review
I honestly ended up enjoying this book a lot more than I expected to.
What immediately stood out to me was the setting because growing up on the grounds of a state mental hospital already creates such a unique atmosphere for a family story. Mercy Hill itself feels almost like another family member throughout the book. It’s falling apart, underfunded, emotionally heavy, and filled with tension, but it also becomes home for these sisters in a way that deeply shapes who they become.
This book is definitely more character driven and emotional than plot heavy, but that really worked for me here because the relationships between the sisters and their mother carried so much weight. The story slowly unfolds through Denise’s perspective, and I loved how reflective and personal the narration felt. There’s this lingering sadness underneath everything because you can feel how much these girls grew up carrying responsibilities and emotional pressure that should never have belonged to children.
The mother, Lisa Cross, was honestly one of the most fascinating parts of the story for me because she’s so complicated. She’s passionate, intelligent, determined, controlling, exhausting, and deeply flawed all at once. You can tell she genuinely believes in her mission to save Mercy Hill and protect mental healthcare, but at the same time, her obsession with that mission affects her daughters in ways that become increasingly painful as they get older.
And honestly, that was one of the strongest parts of the book for me overall: watching how growing up in that environment shaped each sister differently. Some cling tightly to the family mission, some try to escape it completely, and others get emotionally trapped somewhere in the middle. The story captures that feeling of siblings surviving the same childhood but carrying entirely different emotional scars from it.
I also thought the book handled mental healthcare and institutional decline in America in a really interesting way. Mercy Hill is constantly under threat, constantly lacking resources, constantly fighting to survive, and you can feel the frustration, hopelessness, and pressure surrounding everyone connected to it. The hospital becomes symbolic of so many things throughout the story: duty, sacrifice, identity, generational pressure, and even emotional entrapment.
At the same time, this never felt overly heavy or emotionally unbearable because there’s also warmth, humor, sisterhood, and genuine love running through the story too. The relationships between the sisters felt believable to me because they’re messy, protective, resentful, loyal, and deeply connected in ways only sisters can really understand.
I also loved the late 90s and early 2000s atmosphere woven throughout the story because it grounded everything in this very specific emotional era without making it feel gimmicky. It added another layer of nostalgia and realism to the family dynamics.
This is definitely one of those quieter literary family dramas where the emotional unraveling matters more than huge shocking twists, but I found myself really invested in the characters and the emotional tension inside the family. By the end, I genuinely cared about these sisters and what Mercy Hill represented to all of them.
For me, this ended up being such a thoughtful, emotional story about family loyalty, identity, sisterhood, mental healthcare, and the complicated ways parents shape their children without always realizing the damage they leave behind.
✅ Would I Recommend It?
Absolutely if you enjoy literary family dramas, sister stories, emotionally layered character driven books, complicated mother daughter relationships, and stories exploring mental healthcare, identity, and family pressure.
May 20, 2026
Love character driven novels about family dynamics. This one was especially different since the family lives on the grounds of Mercy Hill. The 4 Sisters all volunteer many hours throughout their childhood by their Intelligent, Driven, but also hard charging mother who really expects her daughters to follow in her footsteps and become psychiatric dr’s. It’s more the mother’s dream and how each sister reacts to these expectations plays out in different ways. The story is narrated by Denise, the youngest sister. So, although she explains the story of the other sisters it is through her eyes. Was captivating though, as their childhood was so different than most kids, it alienates them from making friends at school, yet at times they are close and others pull in different directions. It is larger based on the experiences, one in particular, that each had to go through dealing with seriously mentally ill patients, as well as there domineering mother letting them know she expects help from them all. Also, behind the family, is their goal, to keep Mercy Hill open at a time when large psychiatric facilities are being defunded. There were large problems warehousing mentally ill patients without proper staffing and funds, yet the fantasy that so many patients would find smaller and nicer group homes was unlikely to happen. So, where do they go then? For 4 young girls, mostly in their teen years, it’s a heavy load to be placed on them. Does Mom really care about Mercy Hill and it’s patients or does she just want to be on Top making all the Decisions. I think it was a mix of both and her daughters felt treated the same way.
Well Written Book. Excellent Debut Novel by Hannah Thurman. The author spent her childhood in Raleigh, NC and there was the Dorothy Dix Facility. Her mom worked there for a few years. I know this area, and it did feel authentic and well researched. It was timely then and is still an important issue now. I felt the book came together well.
Thank you NetGalley and Doubleday for a copy of this book. I always leave reviews of books I read.
Well Written Book. Excellent Debut Novel by Hannah Thurman. The author spent her childhood in Raleigh, NC and there was the Dorothy Dix Facility. Her mom worked there for a few years. I know this area, and it did feel authentic and well researched. It was timely then and is still an important issue now. I felt the book came together well.
Thank you NetGalley and Doubleday for a copy of this book. I always leave reviews of books I read.
May 17, 2026
I picked this book up because I was very interested in how the author was going to navigate the good and bad of psychiatric health facilities from the perspective of a child. That didn’t get explored as much as I was hoping for, and I think it could’ve benefitted from more of those complexities. This was definitely more of a family drama, based in a narrative of fractured sisterhood and parental pressure.
That being said, I enjoyed it! This book has very strong characterization, exploring several different outcomes of childhood trauma. Each family member was so different, and shared so many similarities underneath. Denise as a narrator was frustrating, sympathetic, unreliable, and vulnerable all at the same time. The relationship dynamics between the sisters were the most interesting, although I wish we got to see more of them one on one.
The ending was a little abrupt, and disrupted some previous characterization without giving enough time for it to settle or be understood before jumping into the 20 year time skip epilogue. Overall though, I was satisfied with everyone’s arcs and endings. They felt imperfectly realistic.
That being said, I enjoyed it! This book has very strong characterization, exploring several different outcomes of childhood trauma. Each family member was so different, and shared so many similarities underneath. Denise as a narrator was frustrating, sympathetic, unreliable, and vulnerable all at the same time. The relationship dynamics between the sisters were the most interesting, although I wish we got to see more of them one on one.
The ending was a little abrupt, and disrupted some previous characterization without giving enough time for it to settle or be understood before jumping into the 20 year time skip epilogue. Overall though, I was satisfied with everyone’s arcs and endings. They felt imperfectly realistic.
May 17, 2026
3.75 ⭐️
From the setting to the sibling dynamics, this book felt layered in such a natural and believable way. This felt less like a dramatic historical fiction novel and more like quietly stepping into a family’s life and growing up alongside them. The setting at Mercy Hill gave the story such a unique atmosphere, and I ended up really invested in the sisters and all the complicated family dynamics. I liked how grounded and realistic the story felt, especially the family dynamics, and I thought the mental health aspects were handled with a lot of care.
The pacing felt steady and reflective in a way that matched the story really well, and the writing had such a warmth to it that made the characters easy to connect with. I also liked that it focused just as much on identity and family pressure as it did on the historical backdrop. I kept wanting to return to the story because the characters felt so authentic.
I’m really glad I listened to this one because Christine Lakin’s narration fit the tone of the story perfectly. For a debut novel, Hannah Thurman really impressed me, and I’m eager to read whatever she writes next. (Audio)
From the setting to the sibling dynamics, this book felt layered in such a natural and believable way. This felt less like a dramatic historical fiction novel and more like quietly stepping into a family’s life and growing up alongside them. The setting at Mercy Hill gave the story such a unique atmosphere, and I ended up really invested in the sisters and all the complicated family dynamics. I liked how grounded and realistic the story felt, especially the family dynamics, and I thought the mental health aspects were handled with a lot of care.
The pacing felt steady and reflective in a way that matched the story really well, and the writing had such a warmth to it that made the characters easy to connect with. I also liked that it focused just as much on identity and family pressure as it did on the historical backdrop. I kept wanting to return to the story because the characters felt so authentic.
I’m really glad I listened to this one because Christine Lakin’s narration fit the tone of the story perfectly. For a debut novel, Hannah Thurman really impressed me, and I’m eager to read whatever she writes next. (Audio)
October 4, 2025
Four sisters are raised “on site” at Mercy Hill, a North Carolina residential mental health facility operated by their psychiatrist mother. The book is told from the perspective of the youngest sister, 9 when the book begins and following her through her college years. All four sisters are borderline-prodigy “child geniuses,” skipping multiple grade levels repeatedly and at will, ivy-league courted, destined and duty-bound to become MD’s and return to Mercy Hill to continue their mother’s mission. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your feelings) Mercy Hill is constantly under threat of closure in favor of less restrictive settings for the population it serves.
The book captivated me with its premise but lost me a bit in the execution. Mainly I felt that some elements erred on the side of unrealistic. 4 child geniuses, but no explanation or commentary on how unusual this would be in any given family, just presented as a fact early on in the story. An extremely domineering mother, to the point of demanding all 4 of her children follow precisely in her footsteps, but no one really bats an eye. The story builds ominously toward a “shocking” event, but when it happens it is covered so quickly that it feels anticlimactic and a bit rushed. Overall I did enjoy this story and think others will too, I just wish we got a little bit more here and there.
Thank you Net Galley for the opportunity to read early and review!
The book captivated me with its premise but lost me a bit in the execution. Mainly I felt that some elements erred on the side of unrealistic. 4 child geniuses, but no explanation or commentary on how unusual this would be in any given family, just presented as a fact early on in the story. An extremely domineering mother, to the point of demanding all 4 of her children follow precisely in her footsteps, but no one really bats an eye. The story builds ominously toward a “shocking” event, but when it happens it is covered so quickly that it feels anticlimactic and a bit rushed. Overall I did enjoy this story and think others will too, I just wish we got a little bit more here and there.
Thank you Net Galley for the opportunity to read early and review!
Read
May 20, 2026I've enjoyed Hannah Thurman's work in the past—"Agency," published in The Iowa Review, is a mordant and astute X-ray of advertising culture, told with bracing candor—and this, her début novel, was also quite striking, but in a very different way.
A portrait of a family on the point of schism, this novel opens to a startling and evocative image: children—four girls—at risk from the threat of an inmate of a mental asylum. This risk, though keenly felt, is quickly dispelled by the entrance of the girls' mother—also known as Dr. Lisa Cross, the head of psychiatry at said asylum. Dr. Cross, her husband, and their four daughters all live "on campus" at Mercy Hill, in a cottage a stone's throw from three rapidly dilapidating buildings that house a variety of disturbed and unwell patients. This unique setting instantly creates intrigue and suspense, but as the story unfolds, it is the author's careful attention to the dimensionality of each person we meet—even the tertiary ones!—that really ended up setting this novel apart for me.
Told from the first-person point of view of Denise, the youngest of the four daughters, the novel almost instantly showcases a command of character that I have not too often seen in a début. Juggling one or two voices is often difficult enough (as a reader OR a writer) without dialogue attribution tags, but here I found it effortless to follow—there was never a moment when I was confused as to which sister was speaking, even when all four were present. There is a nearly painful verisimilitude to this story, and not a moment went by when I felt even the slightest twinge of disbelief in reaction to any character's choice—even the shocking ones. Each of the sisters are unbearably precocious—unbearable most of all to themselves—and are herded through their education with a furious alacrity by the unswerving hand of their matriarch.
Through it all, the titular facility spills its dark shadow over every event, even when it is not physically present on the page. I found the slow and horrific breakdown of deinstitutionalization portrayed with sympathy and humanity on the page—a light authorial touch, implicitly trusting the reader and choosing to illustrate, rather than preach. I was engrossed throughout, despite feeling that Denise acted more as a passive observer and lens for the action in the beginning of the novel, occasionally inserting a cryptic clairvoyance of dire events still to come. Once her distinct personality came to the fore, the story acquired new life and I became even more invested in its progression.
Still, I think that minor cavil could even be explained through the sharply-drawn psychological lines the author has built here: the novel is essentially a bildungsroman, and as the narrator is the youngest of a group that is tearing itself to pieces, it makes perfect sense that she emerges later than the others, frozen as she is in a fawning response to a group of people who are tearing themselves apart. Emotional resonance vibrates through the story like a plucked string, and echoes of past actions reverberate when least expected, with some real gut-punches that took my breath away—a late-story image of the character in Montauk was especially brutal, and gorgeously delivered. Streaks of bracing humor even leaven tragedy in surprising, refreshing ways; often dryly, mordantly self-aware.
I think one of the better things about this novel is how open it is to the concept of debate, and how earnestly it exhorts the reader to consider each character as more than just a collection of maladies or neurodivergence—they are fully formed beings, and each portrayed with such a complexity that it was hard not to feel sympathetic for them even at their most brazenly villainous. Many disturbing and easily-reduced moral quandaries are evinced in the span of this book (some of which I imagine might provoke disgust or horror.) However, the strength of Mercy Hill is how brilliantly it illustrates the necessity of what has sadly become all-too-desperate in our modern age: a consideration for the entire spectrum of belief. Too quickly do we dismiss or revile what we do not understand without curiosity; this novel shows in no uncertain terms that a capacity for compassion is as important as any act of mercy.
A portrait of a family on the point of schism, this novel opens to a startling and evocative image: children—four girls—at risk from the threat of an inmate of a mental asylum. This risk, though keenly felt, is quickly dispelled by the entrance of the girls' mother—also known as Dr. Lisa Cross, the head of psychiatry at said asylum. Dr. Cross, her husband, and their four daughters all live "on campus" at Mercy Hill, in a cottage a stone's throw from three rapidly dilapidating buildings that house a variety of disturbed and unwell patients. This unique setting instantly creates intrigue and suspense, but as the story unfolds, it is the author's careful attention to the dimensionality of each person we meet—even the tertiary ones!—that really ended up setting this novel apart for me.
Told from the first-person point of view of Denise, the youngest of the four daughters, the novel almost instantly showcases a command of character that I have not too often seen in a début. Juggling one or two voices is often difficult enough (as a reader OR a writer) without dialogue attribution tags, but here I found it effortless to follow—there was never a moment when I was confused as to which sister was speaking, even when all four were present. There is a nearly painful verisimilitude to this story, and not a moment went by when I felt even the slightest twinge of disbelief in reaction to any character's choice—even the shocking ones. Each of the sisters are unbearably precocious—unbearable most of all to themselves—and are herded through their education with a furious alacrity by the unswerving hand of their matriarch.
Through it all, the titular facility spills its dark shadow over every event, even when it is not physically present on the page. I found the slow and horrific breakdown of deinstitutionalization portrayed with sympathy and humanity on the page—a light authorial touch, implicitly trusting the reader and choosing to illustrate, rather than preach. I was engrossed throughout, despite feeling that Denise acted more as a passive observer and lens for the action in the beginning of the novel, occasionally inserting a cryptic clairvoyance of dire events still to come. Once her distinct personality came to the fore, the story acquired new life and I became even more invested in its progression.
Still, I think that minor cavil could even be explained through the sharply-drawn psychological lines the author has built here: the novel is essentially a bildungsroman, and as the narrator is the youngest of a group that is tearing itself to pieces, it makes perfect sense that she emerges later than the others, frozen as she is in a fawning response to a group of people who are tearing themselves apart. Emotional resonance vibrates through the story like a plucked string, and echoes of past actions reverberate when least expected, with some real gut-punches that took my breath away—a late-story image of the character in Montauk was especially brutal, and gorgeously delivered. Streaks of bracing humor even leaven tragedy in surprising, refreshing ways; often dryly, mordantly self-aware.
I think one of the better things about this novel is how open it is to the concept of debate, and how earnestly it exhorts the reader to consider each character as more than just a collection of maladies or neurodivergence—they are fully formed beings, and each portrayed with such a complexity that it was hard not to feel sympathetic for them even at their most brazenly villainous. Many disturbing and easily-reduced moral quandaries are evinced in the span of this book (some of which I imagine might provoke disgust or horror.) However, the strength of Mercy Hill is how brilliantly it illustrates the necessity of what has sadly become all-too-desperate in our modern age: a consideration for the entire spectrum of belief. Too quickly do we dismiss or revile what we do not understand without curiosity; this novel shows in no uncertain terms that a capacity for compassion is as important as any act of mercy.
May 15, 2026
this book kinda just … ended? with no real ending? i kept waiting for something to happen and it didn’t
May 18, 2026
Emma said it best—I couldn’t put it down, yet it was surprisingly underwhelming.
May 10, 2026
The Sun Goes Missing at Noon
Hannah Thurman’s “Mercy Hill” turns a state hospital, four daughters, and a mother’s saving mission into a family novel about love mistaken for duty.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 5th, 2026
“Cottage 10 Under the Noon Shadow” – the small family home sits beneath the looming Mercy Hill buildings, where light, love, duty, and institutional shadow become the first architecture of the Cross sisters’ childhood.
The Cross sisters do not grow up beside Mercy Hill so much as under it. Each day at noon, the stone buildings of the Raleigh state mental hospital overrule the sun above Cottage 10, where J.J., Caro, Mimi, and Denise live with their parents on the hospital grounds. In Hannah Thurman’s “Mercy Hill,” that shadow is not stage fog. It is the book’s first diagnosis. Before the novel tells us what Lisa Cross has done to her daughters, it shows us the operating law of their childhood: light arrives, light is overruled, everyone adjusts.
Lisa Cross, M.D., is Mercy Hill’s Director of Psychiatry, the first woman installed in that office, and the presiding pressure system of the Cross household. Her praise feels like being knighted; her displeasure can strip a room of oxygen. She is brilliant, punitive, occasionally comic by permission, and almost always accurate in the particular way that makes her mistakes harder to survive.
Lisa’s complaint against the world is simple: state hospitals are being closed, gutted, sold, and abandoned by ledger-minded officials who prefer tidy numbers to complicated aftermaths. Mercy Hill must not be next. Her daughters are raised not only to admire this cause, but to be conscripted into it. Childhood, in Lisa’s house, is a temporary inefficiency.
The girls are taught to read usefulness as love before they can name either one. They learn the names of legislators, antipsychotics, enemies, wards, and people on agendas. They learn the difference between a resident’s off-pass and an escape. They know which adults can sign which papers, which buildings are threatened, which phrases will sound persuasive at a hearing. Lisa’s orange-binder war plan sits in the kitchen like scripture with tabs. The girls are to become doctors, advocates, witnesses – proof with homework. Other children get electives. The Cross sisters get jurisdiction.
“Scripture with Tabs” – Lisa’s orange-binder war plan turns the kitchen table into doctrine, where paperwork, motherhood, strategy, and love begin to share the same uneasy surface.
Denise narrates from adulthood with a bruise still under the skin. She looks back at the years when Mercy Hill’s emptying and the family’s unthreading became the same event. The childhood cracks open when ten-year-old Mimi falls from a magnolia tree into Ward C’s high-security yard. She lands injured among the residents, including Alexander White, whom the girls call the Scarecrow. No one in the scene is allowed one meaning. Alexander is frightening; he may also be trying to help. He touches Mimi’s blood with an eerie tenderness, and Lisa, arriving in her white coat, rescues her daughter while almost instantly erasing that possibility. Mimi’s body is hurt, the hospital is left exposed, and the accident becomes a fissure in Lisa’s fortress.
“The Magnolia Fall / Ward C Edge” – broken magnolia blossoms, a boundary fence, and the distant Ward C yard mark the moment childhood crosses into institutional danger without yet understanding the terms of the crossing.
Lisa responds not by drawing the family back, but by accelerating its usefulness. She transfers all four girls to Lincoln, an academically rigorous magnet school, and has each skip two grades. They are too young for the hallways, too strange for the other students, and much too fluent in adult catastrophe to pass as ordinary children. Denise becomes “Psycho Denise,” a nickname that lands because school is often where cruelty first discovers its talent for filing. J.J. becomes the family’s obvious prodigy and then its most devastating refuser. Caro finds in evangelical Christianity a rival authority Lisa cannot correct in red pen. Mimi, wild, perceptive, and often furious, becomes the daughter most willing to say that the mission is not the same as mercy.
Soon the girls are on Ward B, though “volunteering” is a polite word for children drafted into adult suffering with pediatric hands. They collect trays, help residents, learn staff rhythms, and discover that Mercy Hill is both home and workplace, refuge and danger, ideal and failing machine. Policy enters as a body in the hallway. A staffing shortage is a corridor with no adult where one should be. A ward closure is a dinner table gone quiet. A budget fight is a mother’s jaw tightening at the kitchen window while her daughters wait to be told what they are meant to become next.
“Mercy Hill” is a novel about psychiatric care in America, but it is more precisely a novel about what happens when a civic good becomes a private religion. The trap is that Lisa is not wrong enough to dismiss. The hospital shelters people the outside world is prepared to off-load. The promised alternatives to institutions – community care, group homes, outpatient treatment, less restrictive accommodations – often appear here as phrases with better manners than the realities they cover. When Mercy Hill fails, its work is shunted elsewhere: to prisons, to emergency rooms, to families, to streets, to whoever is standing closest.
By the epilogue, Lisa is working at Central Prison, where many former Ward C residents have landed. Thurman does not pound the table. The road has been visible all along.
Accuracy is not absolution. Lisa’s own mother lived with untreated mental illness; her father answered suffering with prayer, shame, and judgment. Lisa’s career is a counterargument to that childhood, but she raises her daughters as living proof in her case against the world. They must show that intelligence can defeat abandonment, that medicine can rebuke superstition, that preparation can outpace grief. It is a beautifully reasoned fantasy with sharp teeth.
In Lisa’s hands, care keeps turning into custody. Her love is real. So is her claim. When she destroys J.J.’s beloved porcelain dolls after Mimi’s fall, the cruelty is unmistakable, but so is the panic beneath it: one daughter has been hurt, another has failed as eldest soldier, the hospital is vulnerable. When Lisa persuades a frightened resident to accept an injection by letting him prick her with the needle first, she is terrifyingly good at her job. When she scripts her daughters for public testimony, folds them into ward work, and treats their futures as assets of the cause, she becomes unforgivable in a way that remains human.
That doubleness keeps Lisa from becoming a monster in a white coat. She is a mother who confuses stewardship with ownership, calling with conquest, and daughters with deputies. Some parents do not love too little. They love through a story so large that their children disappear inside it.
Thurman’s prose has the pace of testimony and the heat of memory. Denise’s voice preserves the child’s sensory immediacy while allowing the adult to notice what the child could not yet name. The sun climbs the paneled wall. Magnolia blossoms scatter under Mimi’s body. Drug-rep pens marked with medication names slide into Denise’s backpack. Plastic restraints snap. The Scarecrow touches blood. A kitchen window frames the buildings above. The details arrive as facts first, symbols later.
This is not memory softened for display. The language has edges. In Cottage 10, bureaucracy is not paperwork; it is table talk: wards, off-passes, diagnoses, medication closets, committee hearings, bunk beds, spaghetti, dolls, school insults, church water. Denise has been trained by Lisa to classify, argue, and defend; her adult voice still bears the marks of that training. Sometimes she explains too efficiently, as though afraid the record might close wrong. More often, that explanatory pressure feels earned. She is reviewing a childhood whose first judge was her mother.
Objects do some of Thurman’s best thinking. The symbolism is not shy – shadow, stone, fences, locked rooms, war binders – but it usually has the decency to arrive carrying groceries. A lesser novel would pin a label to every object and send it down the runway. Thurman mostly lets things stay useful: a fence cuts, a binder organizes, a doll breaks, a ward empties. Meaning comes later, like a bill.
The structure is plain-built and weight-bearing, a chronological frame that knows it is also a countdown. “Mercy Hill” moves through dated sections, from 1999 to a 2024 epilogue, and the straightness suits the material. Each year records two declines at once: Mercy Hill empties; Lisa’s daughters scatter. The design’s most revealing image comes when Lisa looks from the cottage toward the hospital’s four stone buildings: shuttered Ward A, active wards B and C, and the Admin building planted among them. Four buildings, four daughters. It is almost too neat, which is exactly why it works. Lisa’s mind turns children into architecture and architecture into destiny. Thurman lets the pattern stand, then lets time ruin its symmetry.
The momentum is not built on mystery. We are not reading to discover whether the hospital will be saved in any simple sense; the shadow has told us from the beginning that the buildings are already winning and already doomed. The question is what Lisa will require next, which daughter will mistake obedience for love, and what kind of person Denise can become once usefulness stops feeling like proof of worth. Thurman sequences the sisters’ departures with care. J.J.’s refusal of Princeton is not mere rebellion; it is a locked door she closes on herself as much as on Lisa. Caro’s faith infuriates Lisa because it offers another grammar of rescue. Mimi’s violence at school is alarming, but it is also the family’s suppressed rage finally acquiring a weapon literal enough to be noticed. Denise’s eventual turn toward law and music is the quietest escape because it is the one that stops asking Lisa’s permission to count.
Ashley Stillman’s death turns the lock. Ashley, a young resident whose anger and vulnerability have become familiar to the girls, steals a knife and dies by suicide while the sisters are shut in a medication closet. The scene converts the family virtue of helpfulness into lifelong guilt. The girls were children, but Lisa’s house has trained them to feel responsible for adult systems. After Ashley, Mercy Hill can no longer be only the embattled refuge they are saving. It is also the place that taught them proximity was power, then proved otherwise.
“Ward B / The Medication Closet” – a closed medication closet door and a dim Ward B corridor hold the aftermath of Ashley Stillman’s death, where usefulness becomes guilt and proximity proves powerless.
Thurman’s wisdom is to leave the contradiction with its burrs intact. She does not tell either easy story: that old psychiatric hospitals were only gothic warehouses of harm, or that their closure was uncomplicated progress. Mercy Hill is necessary and dangerous. It shelters and consumes. It gives Lisa purpose and gives her a language in which to injure her daughters. The residents need care. The daughters need rescue. The mother cannot fully provide one without damaging the other.
Denise’s intimacy with this world casts the book’s shadow outward. Some residents stay at the edge of the lit circle, vivid enough to wound the family, not always spacious enough to escape it. Ashley, Bethy, David Johnson, and Alexander White are memorable presences, but the narrative gravity nearly always pulls them back toward what they reveal about Lisa, Denise, and the sisters. That is a defensible choice – this is Denise’s account, not a panoramic history of the hospital – but it leaves the book exposed. A novel so concerned with people lost inside institutions cannot entirely sidestep the question of who receives a room of their own in the narrative and who becomes the event that changes someone else.
The frame does crowd: school tracking, religion, prison, foster care, race, public land, adolescent sexuality, each arriving with a chair and a claim. Most belong organically to the Crosses’ world; not all receive equal depth. Those pressures matter most when they arrive as rooms: a dinner table, a school hallway, a ward shift, a locked closet, a college visit. The novel is less sure-footed when Denise steps forward to summarize what the scene has already made legible. The reach occasionally outruns the seating chart, though not the force of its central wound.
At the last Christmas dinner before Mercy Hill’s closure, all four daughters are present, altered and uneasy, and Lisa looks past them toward the four dark buildings above. The image is almost schematic, but the book has paid for it. The living daughters have returned; the stone daughters still hold Lisa’s gaze. The 2024 epilogue then asks which sister “fared the best,” and the question quietly dismantles Lisa’s old scale of success. The answer is not the daughter who became the doctor Lisa imagined. It may be Mimi, once the wildest and most alarming, now working in foster care operations and, by Denise’s account, the happiest. She has found a way to care without needing the fortress.
“The Last Christmas Dinner / The Gaze Beyond” – four daughters gather at the table while the dark buildings wait beyond the window, making Lisa’s divided attention the final, aching architecture of “Mercy Hill.”
That reversal rescues the ending from tidy grief. “Mercy Hill” does not finally ask whether Lisa loved her daughters. Of course she did. It asks whether love can remain love when it conscripts children into the repair of an adult wound. It asks what happens when a cause is too necessary to dismiss and too damaging to obey. It asks whether a family can leave a place that has already taught them how to understand leaving.
If one wanted company for Thurman’s novel, one might gesture toward Ann Patchett’s “The Dutch House,” where a place becomes a family’s second bloodstream, or Susanna Kaysen’s “Girl, Interrupted,” where an institution has its own weather and grammar. But “Mercy Hill” is finally less interested in resemblance than in afterimage: what remains on the eye after the building is gone, the ward is locked, the mother has turned away, and the daughters are still deciding which shadows were shelter.
My rating is 87/100, which translates under my rubric to 4/5 stars on Goodreads. That score marks a strong novel held just below the highest tier by uneven secondary lives and by its occasional habit of explaining what its scenes have already proved. Its best pages leave Mercy Hill warm to the touch.
In the end, the hospital’s most troubling architecture is not stone but attention: four daughters in the room, four buildings in their mother’s gaze, and the sun, briefly interrupted, returning as if nothing had happened.
Early thumbnail studies map the emotional geometry of “Mercy Hill”: cottage below, institution above, and the first rough shape of a shadow large enough to organize the whole image.
The faint pencil underdrawing reveals the bones of the watercolor before atmosphere arrives: Cottage 10, the hill, the hospital buildings, the bench, the tree lattice, and the waiting border.
The first green-gray wash begins turning structure into mood, letting the cottage, lawn, and distant buildings emerge as a place already half-claimed by shadow.
The cover-derived swatch sheet shows the discipline behind the series: muted olives, sage, deep forest greens, cream light, and restrained brick tones held to one quiet emotional register.
The border study explores containment through branch, stone, and grounds-line motifs, turning the edge of the paper into a subtle echo of Mercy Hill’s boundaries.
This detail study refines the image’s quiet symbols – the vulnerable cottage, the empty bench, and the bare branches that make the landscape feel watchful before it feels explained.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Hannah Thurman’s “Mercy Hill” turns a state hospital, four daughters, and a mother’s saving mission into a family novel about love mistaken for duty.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 5th, 2026
“Cottage 10 Under the Noon Shadow” – the small family home sits beneath the looming Mercy Hill buildings, where light, love, duty, and institutional shadow become the first architecture of the Cross sisters’ childhood.
The Cross sisters do not grow up beside Mercy Hill so much as under it. Each day at noon, the stone buildings of the Raleigh state mental hospital overrule the sun above Cottage 10, where J.J., Caro, Mimi, and Denise live with their parents on the hospital grounds. In Hannah Thurman’s “Mercy Hill,” that shadow is not stage fog. It is the book’s first diagnosis. Before the novel tells us what Lisa Cross has done to her daughters, it shows us the operating law of their childhood: light arrives, light is overruled, everyone adjusts.
Lisa Cross, M.D., is Mercy Hill’s Director of Psychiatry, the first woman installed in that office, and the presiding pressure system of the Cross household. Her praise feels like being knighted; her displeasure can strip a room of oxygen. She is brilliant, punitive, occasionally comic by permission, and almost always accurate in the particular way that makes her mistakes harder to survive.
Lisa’s complaint against the world is simple: state hospitals are being closed, gutted, sold, and abandoned by ledger-minded officials who prefer tidy numbers to complicated aftermaths. Mercy Hill must not be next. Her daughters are raised not only to admire this cause, but to be conscripted into it. Childhood, in Lisa’s house, is a temporary inefficiency.
The girls are taught to read usefulness as love before they can name either one. They learn the names of legislators, antipsychotics, enemies, wards, and people on agendas. They learn the difference between a resident’s off-pass and an escape. They know which adults can sign which papers, which buildings are threatened, which phrases will sound persuasive at a hearing. Lisa’s orange-binder war plan sits in the kitchen like scripture with tabs. The girls are to become doctors, advocates, witnesses – proof with homework. Other children get electives. The Cross sisters get jurisdiction.
“Scripture with Tabs” – Lisa’s orange-binder war plan turns the kitchen table into doctrine, where paperwork, motherhood, strategy, and love begin to share the same uneasy surface.
Denise narrates from adulthood with a bruise still under the skin. She looks back at the years when Mercy Hill’s emptying and the family’s unthreading became the same event. The childhood cracks open when ten-year-old Mimi falls from a magnolia tree into Ward C’s high-security yard. She lands injured among the residents, including Alexander White, whom the girls call the Scarecrow. No one in the scene is allowed one meaning. Alexander is frightening; he may also be trying to help. He touches Mimi’s blood with an eerie tenderness, and Lisa, arriving in her white coat, rescues her daughter while almost instantly erasing that possibility. Mimi’s body is hurt, the hospital is left exposed, and the accident becomes a fissure in Lisa’s fortress.
“The Magnolia Fall / Ward C Edge” – broken magnolia blossoms, a boundary fence, and the distant Ward C yard mark the moment childhood crosses into institutional danger without yet understanding the terms of the crossing.
Lisa responds not by drawing the family back, but by accelerating its usefulness. She transfers all four girls to Lincoln, an academically rigorous magnet school, and has each skip two grades. They are too young for the hallways, too strange for the other students, and much too fluent in adult catastrophe to pass as ordinary children. Denise becomes “Psycho Denise,” a nickname that lands because school is often where cruelty first discovers its talent for filing. J.J. becomes the family’s obvious prodigy and then its most devastating refuser. Caro finds in evangelical Christianity a rival authority Lisa cannot correct in red pen. Mimi, wild, perceptive, and often furious, becomes the daughter most willing to say that the mission is not the same as mercy.
Soon the girls are on Ward B, though “volunteering” is a polite word for children drafted into adult suffering with pediatric hands. They collect trays, help residents, learn staff rhythms, and discover that Mercy Hill is both home and workplace, refuge and danger, ideal and failing machine. Policy enters as a body in the hallway. A staffing shortage is a corridor with no adult where one should be. A ward closure is a dinner table gone quiet. A budget fight is a mother’s jaw tightening at the kitchen window while her daughters wait to be told what they are meant to become next.
“Mercy Hill” is a novel about psychiatric care in America, but it is more precisely a novel about what happens when a civic good becomes a private religion. The trap is that Lisa is not wrong enough to dismiss. The hospital shelters people the outside world is prepared to off-load. The promised alternatives to institutions – community care, group homes, outpatient treatment, less restrictive accommodations – often appear here as phrases with better manners than the realities they cover. When Mercy Hill fails, its work is shunted elsewhere: to prisons, to emergency rooms, to families, to streets, to whoever is standing closest.
By the epilogue, Lisa is working at Central Prison, where many former Ward C residents have landed. Thurman does not pound the table. The road has been visible all along.
Accuracy is not absolution. Lisa’s own mother lived with untreated mental illness; her father answered suffering with prayer, shame, and judgment. Lisa’s career is a counterargument to that childhood, but she raises her daughters as living proof in her case against the world. They must show that intelligence can defeat abandonment, that medicine can rebuke superstition, that preparation can outpace grief. It is a beautifully reasoned fantasy with sharp teeth.
In Lisa’s hands, care keeps turning into custody. Her love is real. So is her claim. When she destroys J.J.’s beloved porcelain dolls after Mimi’s fall, the cruelty is unmistakable, but so is the panic beneath it: one daughter has been hurt, another has failed as eldest soldier, the hospital is vulnerable. When Lisa persuades a frightened resident to accept an injection by letting him prick her with the needle first, she is terrifyingly good at her job. When she scripts her daughters for public testimony, folds them into ward work, and treats their futures as assets of the cause, she becomes unforgivable in a way that remains human.
That doubleness keeps Lisa from becoming a monster in a white coat. She is a mother who confuses stewardship with ownership, calling with conquest, and daughters with deputies. Some parents do not love too little. They love through a story so large that their children disappear inside it.
Thurman’s prose has the pace of testimony and the heat of memory. Denise’s voice preserves the child’s sensory immediacy while allowing the adult to notice what the child could not yet name. The sun climbs the paneled wall. Magnolia blossoms scatter under Mimi’s body. Drug-rep pens marked with medication names slide into Denise’s backpack. Plastic restraints snap. The Scarecrow touches blood. A kitchen window frames the buildings above. The details arrive as facts first, symbols later.
This is not memory softened for display. The language has edges. In Cottage 10, bureaucracy is not paperwork; it is table talk: wards, off-passes, diagnoses, medication closets, committee hearings, bunk beds, spaghetti, dolls, school insults, church water. Denise has been trained by Lisa to classify, argue, and defend; her adult voice still bears the marks of that training. Sometimes she explains too efficiently, as though afraid the record might close wrong. More often, that explanatory pressure feels earned. She is reviewing a childhood whose first judge was her mother.
Objects do some of Thurman’s best thinking. The symbolism is not shy – shadow, stone, fences, locked rooms, war binders – but it usually has the decency to arrive carrying groceries. A lesser novel would pin a label to every object and send it down the runway. Thurman mostly lets things stay useful: a fence cuts, a binder organizes, a doll breaks, a ward empties. Meaning comes later, like a bill.
The structure is plain-built and weight-bearing, a chronological frame that knows it is also a countdown. “Mercy Hill” moves through dated sections, from 1999 to a 2024 epilogue, and the straightness suits the material. Each year records two declines at once: Mercy Hill empties; Lisa’s daughters scatter. The design’s most revealing image comes when Lisa looks from the cottage toward the hospital’s four stone buildings: shuttered Ward A, active wards B and C, and the Admin building planted among them. Four buildings, four daughters. It is almost too neat, which is exactly why it works. Lisa’s mind turns children into architecture and architecture into destiny. Thurman lets the pattern stand, then lets time ruin its symmetry.
The momentum is not built on mystery. We are not reading to discover whether the hospital will be saved in any simple sense; the shadow has told us from the beginning that the buildings are already winning and already doomed. The question is what Lisa will require next, which daughter will mistake obedience for love, and what kind of person Denise can become once usefulness stops feeling like proof of worth. Thurman sequences the sisters’ departures with care. J.J.’s refusal of Princeton is not mere rebellion; it is a locked door she closes on herself as much as on Lisa. Caro’s faith infuriates Lisa because it offers another grammar of rescue. Mimi’s violence at school is alarming, but it is also the family’s suppressed rage finally acquiring a weapon literal enough to be noticed. Denise’s eventual turn toward law and music is the quietest escape because it is the one that stops asking Lisa’s permission to count.
Ashley Stillman’s death turns the lock. Ashley, a young resident whose anger and vulnerability have become familiar to the girls, steals a knife and dies by suicide while the sisters are shut in a medication closet. The scene converts the family virtue of helpfulness into lifelong guilt. The girls were children, but Lisa’s house has trained them to feel responsible for adult systems. After Ashley, Mercy Hill can no longer be only the embattled refuge they are saving. It is also the place that taught them proximity was power, then proved otherwise.
“Ward B / The Medication Closet” – a closed medication closet door and a dim Ward B corridor hold the aftermath of Ashley Stillman’s death, where usefulness becomes guilt and proximity proves powerless.
Thurman’s wisdom is to leave the contradiction with its burrs intact. She does not tell either easy story: that old psychiatric hospitals were only gothic warehouses of harm, or that their closure was uncomplicated progress. Mercy Hill is necessary and dangerous. It shelters and consumes. It gives Lisa purpose and gives her a language in which to injure her daughters. The residents need care. The daughters need rescue. The mother cannot fully provide one without damaging the other.
Denise’s intimacy with this world casts the book’s shadow outward. Some residents stay at the edge of the lit circle, vivid enough to wound the family, not always spacious enough to escape it. Ashley, Bethy, David Johnson, and Alexander White are memorable presences, but the narrative gravity nearly always pulls them back toward what they reveal about Lisa, Denise, and the sisters. That is a defensible choice – this is Denise’s account, not a panoramic history of the hospital – but it leaves the book exposed. A novel so concerned with people lost inside institutions cannot entirely sidestep the question of who receives a room of their own in the narrative and who becomes the event that changes someone else.
The frame does crowd: school tracking, religion, prison, foster care, race, public land, adolescent sexuality, each arriving with a chair and a claim. Most belong organically to the Crosses’ world; not all receive equal depth. Those pressures matter most when they arrive as rooms: a dinner table, a school hallway, a ward shift, a locked closet, a college visit. The novel is less sure-footed when Denise steps forward to summarize what the scene has already made legible. The reach occasionally outruns the seating chart, though not the force of its central wound.
At the last Christmas dinner before Mercy Hill’s closure, all four daughters are present, altered and uneasy, and Lisa looks past them toward the four dark buildings above. The image is almost schematic, but the book has paid for it. The living daughters have returned; the stone daughters still hold Lisa’s gaze. The 2024 epilogue then asks which sister “fared the best,” and the question quietly dismantles Lisa’s old scale of success. The answer is not the daughter who became the doctor Lisa imagined. It may be Mimi, once the wildest and most alarming, now working in foster care operations and, by Denise’s account, the happiest. She has found a way to care without needing the fortress.
“The Last Christmas Dinner / The Gaze Beyond” – four daughters gather at the table while the dark buildings wait beyond the window, making Lisa’s divided attention the final, aching architecture of “Mercy Hill.”
That reversal rescues the ending from tidy grief. “Mercy Hill” does not finally ask whether Lisa loved her daughters. Of course she did. It asks whether love can remain love when it conscripts children into the repair of an adult wound. It asks what happens when a cause is too necessary to dismiss and too damaging to obey. It asks whether a family can leave a place that has already taught them how to understand leaving.
If one wanted company for Thurman’s novel, one might gesture toward Ann Patchett’s “The Dutch House,” where a place becomes a family’s second bloodstream, or Susanna Kaysen’s “Girl, Interrupted,” where an institution has its own weather and grammar. But “Mercy Hill” is finally less interested in resemblance than in afterimage: what remains on the eye after the building is gone, the ward is locked, the mother has turned away, and the daughters are still deciding which shadows were shelter.
My rating is 87/100, which translates under my rubric to 4/5 stars on Goodreads. That score marks a strong novel held just below the highest tier by uneven secondary lives and by its occasional habit of explaining what its scenes have already proved. Its best pages leave Mercy Hill warm to the touch.
In the end, the hospital’s most troubling architecture is not stone but attention: four daughters in the room, four buildings in their mother’s gaze, and the sun, briefly interrupted, returning as if nothing had happened.
Early thumbnail studies map the emotional geometry of “Mercy Hill”: cottage below, institution above, and the first rough shape of a shadow large enough to organize the whole image.
The faint pencil underdrawing reveals the bones of the watercolor before atmosphere arrives: Cottage 10, the hill, the hospital buildings, the bench, the tree lattice, and the waiting border.
The first green-gray wash begins turning structure into mood, letting the cottage, lawn, and distant buildings emerge as a place already half-claimed by shadow.
The cover-derived swatch sheet shows the discipline behind the series: muted olives, sage, deep forest greens, cream light, and restrained brick tones held to one quiet emotional register.
The border study explores containment through branch, stone, and grounds-line motifs, turning the edge of the paper into a subtle echo of Mercy Hill’s boundaries.
This detail study refines the image’s quiet symbols – the vulnerable cottage, the empty bench, and the bare branches that make the landscape feel watchful before it feels explained.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
August 26, 2025
Ok, so I vacillated between giving this 3 or 4 stars, but ultimately decided to round up to four because, honestly, it was too close for me to call and I always err on the side of more vs less. This is the story of the Cross family, a mother, father, and 4 sisters of varying ages who live on the grounds of a mental health facility. Long story short, the mother, who runs the facility, is whip smart, demanding, willful, and expects her daughters to not only succeed, but to excel at all costs, including their own. The father is kind- a stay at home dad who seems resigned to his fate of being less important to his wife than the facility which she seemingly loves more than anything in her life. The Cross sisters- JJ, Caro, Mimi, and Denise are all intelligent and gifted, and respond to their mother’s heavy handed pressure in wildly varied ways. A good story with a unique setting and family melodrama at its core? Yes, sign me up, please! I’m grateful to netgalley, the publisher, and the author for the opportunity to have read this arc. This is a book full of heart that doesn’t shy away from complicated matters.
May 16, 2026
Should have DNF'D
May 27, 2026
MERCY HILL
BY: HANNAH THURMAN
This was an amazing debut by new to me Author, Hannah Thurman that is called, "Mercy Hill," that is very unique, and mesmerizing in the fact that it is really haunting the way it takes place approximately in the 1990's or early 2000. The family are involved and pushed to the brink since they have grown up being part of the running by their controlling mother. There are four sisters and the youngest one named Denise narrates the story as she watches her three older sisters being forced to share the burden of keeping this Mental Hospital open at all costs. What an interesting premise to grow up with your controlling mother as the director of Psychiatry at a sprawling State and federally funded institution. I'm an older reader so I remember these type of facilities very popular in the 1980's so I've noticed the decline of most of them closing as these same hospitals were very popular then and now in this novel as in life they are closing all across the country and this one in Raleigh, North Carolina the three oldest daughters are part of running it since their mother involves them into taking part in what she hopes they will attend her Ivy League University at Princeton. The eldest three JJ, Caro, and Mimi are all distinct characters whose trajectory does not adhere to their controlling mother's plans to make them attend Medical School and become Psychiatrists like Lisa Cross. You don't argue or disagree with their mercurial mother Dr Lisa Cross. She is facing budget cuts and lack of staff, and she doesn't want the Mental Hospital to close for many reasons just like they are all shutting their doors, and closing these State and Federally funded State Mental institutions. The four daughters of the Director of Psychiatry are all very intelligent and the fact that this is Literary Fiction the depth of character development is layered with beautiful writing. Denise is the youngest and she also is like a genius and is the narrator who also takes into her voice as she is the one who informs the reader how she describes how her three older sisters are affected by growing up by them all living in one of the cottages that is on the sprawling grounds of this hospital with their father Tucker who is the primary caretaker who is very attuned to his daughters and tries to do what he can wanting his daughters to follow their own path. He is the opposite of his wife whose ambitious personality is to include her four daughters in attending the Assembly that consists of the main nurse named Jenny who is part of NAMI that attend these meetings that her and other characters who represent whether the hospital is short staffed and the Mother has coached her daughters what to say as she has them speak of on her behalf on politics that she has taught them what she also has them as her sole purpose to keep the hospital from closing. They are young but know how to be her additional advocates in representing her beliefs in how they are extra members who have been born and grown up to have been taught to not disobey their mother. They have been restricted to stay within the boundaries of Mercy Hill and their mother earns $179,00 per year the youngest daughter Denise has informed the reader. They somehow have received education but also play in the woods building forts on the grounds of Mercy Hill. In the opening chapter Mimi and Denise have climbed a Magnolia tree so they can observe the HB95's who are in Ward C that houses the most dangerous inpatients that have among them murders who have been sent to Mercy Hill since they were deemed insane. It is where their mother works where she has her daughters attend the Assembly that has gathered to discuss whether Mercy Hill's future is to sell the grounds and close the hospital which Ward A is empty due to Federal and State funding has not allowed funding to reopen it in the budget. Dr. Lisa Cross has somehow taught her four young daughters to be in attendance at which they are well versed in their teens to memorize their mothers intellectual understanding of Washington DC history and economics which Denise has been taught at age ten years old to represent her mothers position that Mercy Hill's reasons to not close. The daughters seem to be already coached by their mother to have learned about how the book doesn't explain how they have learned adult level knowledge about President John F. Kennedy's stance on why he supported Mental Health and housing for patients to have access to receive treatment since his sister Rose was cited by Denise that she had been coached by her mother and the book doesn't contain more than how before their mother had her prepared to know she was going to speak as a adult representation of knowing exactly what she had known enough about economics and how she knew about Reagan's putting the Country in debt as if she was an adult whose presence along with her three older sisters were so poised as to add her mother's ideas being a stand in greater numbers who opposed the closure of being among able to have known as much as the other adults who thought it could be sold to developers turning Ward A into Condos or other uses which we only know is that her mother was behind using her daughter's representation that won. By winning it kept the hospital from being closed but that was never explained how her daughters learned adult level policy and this much is understood that is just one way their mother involved her daughters to help their mother by working at the hospital. There mother took them to Washington D.C. where they met a U. S. Senator to which MiMi stole a diamond Broach from his desk, and Denise lets the reader know that none of the sisters spoke about it. Obviously these girls have been taught by their mother that all four would attend Princeton and go on to work beside their mother as Psychiatrists and Dr. Lisa Cross had kept them from leaving the grounds and they have not attended school yet. As I type this her daughters are just as politically inclined as most adults but they all are next to volunteer to help in Ward B, doing whatever Nurse Jenny needs of them which is how they help their mother not that they ever question anything that their mother tells them, but their father is clearly the less domineering and the warmer and nurturing parent who is more likely to stick up for the girls. Denise tells the reader that in the beginning MiMi who is the rebellious sister fell out of the Magnolia Tree where Denise and her were watching the men in Ward C whose outdoor yard is covered in a fence with razor wire on top, and MiMi fell out of the tree and cut her face and arms in razor wire but landed on the inside of the more criminally insane and broke her leg. One of the men outside came over since she couldn't move and was trying to help but put his fingers over her bleeding face, and it was later learned after he was in there for murdering three boys and sent there because he was deemed insane. He was tackled to the ground and put zip ties and Denise said that he was trying to help, but Dr. Lisa Cross took MiMi to the hospital. When they returned their mother took a garbage bag and Threw away JJ's antique doll collection. Dr. Lisa Cross just put them to work in Ward B, and the patients weren't a danger to the girls, but they grew attached to a girl around their age who was in there for trying to commit suicide, and she was the most active and belligerent who kept running away. This is not a nice place and my observation was that once you were committed there you weren't given psychotherapy like the private hospitals, just medicated and there didn't seem to be any plan to rehabilitate you so you were in there for life. Denise tells you how these girls were affected. I just want to say that this place was in Raleigh, North Carolina. I thought the beginning started out slow, but the more I read the more hard it was to put down, and it really doesn't sensationalize these mentally ill patients since it's Literary Fiction it was very eye opening and beautifully written and it was an amazing debut that really was informative and it really was sad because the way these places ran people didn't get better, and if anything they got medicated with no release or the kind of place that was not like the private Mental Hospitals that were where I described where I visited my friend where you got to get voluntary intensive treatment with both psychotherapy and group therapy with Occupational therapy only if you had good health insurance. There was an art room where you could make ceramics and a Dining room where the food was delicious and you got to choose whatever you wanted to eat. I always wondered what our State hospital was where I heard horrible things like this, and I have no idea where it is, but here the food was mush and industrial common showers. I have no idea if that was closed, but when I went to visit my friend it was beautifully furnished with a lot of beautiful rooms to sit and talk. Here in this place these four sisters never had any formal schooling during their youth. They don't have any exposure to life except growing up with experience that's limited to life where they are all under knowing only believing institutionalization is their only exposure to be thinking that these patients were lucky. They do eventually get placed into school where they all skip two grades. This is really Denise's story and her three eldest sisters were all affected and I loved this which I think its another Spectacular debut which was amazing and informative, and I saw the difference between how the one that I visited my friend which I hope that they closed our State Mental hospital, as well. Today, most of the inpatient facilities even the private Mental hospitals are closed. The difference between insurance is what I described how nice it was, and this was very well described and atmospheric. This Author is so gifted and definitely one to watch for whatever she writes in the future I look forward to reading and I highly, highly recommend this as an Electrifying storytelling at its best which deserves to reach as wide of an audience as possible.
The author did get the timeline right, but where reality blurs with fiction is that the criminally insane were not kept in an average Mental hospital that treated everything from every type of depression to schizophrenia, and often substance abuse were not a danger to the other patients. I might be confusing the private Mental hospitals which I was familiar with because those you needed great health insurance and I thought while I visited a friend in a private one that they were nice, but that was out on the open ward which was well furnished and you could sit in private nicely furnished rooms which there were many and reminded me of a hotel. There was a private one that was about a half hour away which was about a half hour away from my house when I visited a friend there. That's the type of patients who were more of a harm to themselves that were among the other patients that I listed the diagnosed types of patients above. I visited the locked wards when she first checked in voluntarily where you had to earn your way to the hotel type of atmosphere, and they went through her belongings and kept certain things like sharp instruments such as disposable razors that were kept with items that weren't allowed but they could be signed out and this was during the 1980's, and this one has got to be a State Mental hospital that I know of two that this sounds like which I've known about one in our State where I never even knew where it was only that it was where people who didn't have health insurance. As I write this those State ones sounded dangerous and I heard they were dangerous so this one in the novel sounds like it was a State Mental hospital that had a reputation for having a place where it could be dangerous, and I did never know anyone there but it was nothing like the place where I visited. I know that the State run hospitals had a mixed population, but I always thought the criminally insane went to a place that was different, but I suppose they were where the criminally insane went. I took some time thinking about it and the clarity struck me as it was over fifty years ago that I have not thought about until I gained more clarity as I write this. Yes, I don't know if our State Mental hospital is closed, but I remembered reading and I thought the descriptions sounded like I would picture in my imagination this sounded more like a State Mental hospital that is if this one where the three older sisters are forced to help their mother who doesn't want the one in this book to close, so she is now forcing her three older daughters to prevent this one from closing, the youngest daughter narrates how her mother is pushing her three daughters to be under more pressure than usual, and the father really does speak up at times to stick up for his daughters. That made this all the more chilling since their Psychiatrist mother pushes her daughters harder now especially after an incident takes place that could cause it to be closed which the youngest daughter describes how things are in vivid detail, and how her sisters are affected, and all three elder ones were. This was a great premise that was cleverly imagined by this debut author who wrote with details that she had me feel sad that I finished it because it was gripping that kept my attention from start to finish with what makes me wonder if our State Mental hospital is closed, then where do they commit people involuntarily that don;t have the health insurance for a last resort? This goes into the type of detail as the youngest daughter observes and describes how her sisters are affected. I can see that this author did her research. I absolutely found this to be an outstanding, and very unique debut that seemed to be crafted by a much more experienced novelist. It is very well written that is captivating that showed an intellectual acumen by the writing with remarkable character development. I'll be recommending this to all of the readers I know who I think would be interested in this, and choosing it for the Book Club at my Local Library where I work and am the person who is in charge of running our Book Club, and there's about twenty six of us that will have a great discussion. I know that I'm going to be thinking about this for a very long time.
Publication Date: May 5, 2026! Available Now to Purchase!
Thank you to Net Galley, Hannah Thurman, and Doubleday Books for generously providing me with my ARC in exchange for a fair and honest review. All opinions are my own, as always.
#MercyHill #HannahThurman #DoubledayBooks #NetGalley
BY: HANNAH THURMAN
This was an amazing debut by new to me Author, Hannah Thurman that is called, "Mercy Hill," that is very unique, and mesmerizing in the fact that it is really haunting the way it takes place approximately in the 1990's or early 2000. The family are involved and pushed to the brink since they have grown up being part of the running by their controlling mother. There are four sisters and the youngest one named Denise narrates the story as she watches her three older sisters being forced to share the burden of keeping this Mental Hospital open at all costs. What an interesting premise to grow up with your controlling mother as the director of Psychiatry at a sprawling State and federally funded institution. I'm an older reader so I remember these type of facilities very popular in the 1980's so I've noticed the decline of most of them closing as these same hospitals were very popular then and now in this novel as in life they are closing all across the country and this one in Raleigh, North Carolina the three oldest daughters are part of running it since their mother involves them into taking part in what she hopes they will attend her Ivy League University at Princeton. The eldest three JJ, Caro, and Mimi are all distinct characters whose trajectory does not adhere to their controlling mother's plans to make them attend Medical School and become Psychiatrists like Lisa Cross. You don't argue or disagree with their mercurial mother Dr Lisa Cross. She is facing budget cuts and lack of staff, and she doesn't want the Mental Hospital to close for many reasons just like they are all shutting their doors, and closing these State and Federally funded State Mental institutions. The four daughters of the Director of Psychiatry are all very intelligent and the fact that this is Literary Fiction the depth of character development is layered with beautiful writing. Denise is the youngest and she also is like a genius and is the narrator who also takes into her voice as she is the one who informs the reader how she describes how her three older sisters are affected by growing up by them all living in one of the cottages that is on the sprawling grounds of this hospital with their father Tucker who is the primary caretaker who is very attuned to his daughters and tries to do what he can wanting his daughters to follow their own path. He is the opposite of his wife whose ambitious personality is to include her four daughters in attending the Assembly that consists of the main nurse named Jenny who is part of NAMI that attend these meetings that her and other characters who represent whether the hospital is short staffed and the Mother has coached her daughters what to say as she has them speak of on her behalf on politics that she has taught them what she also has them as her sole purpose to keep the hospital from closing. They are young but know how to be her additional advocates in representing her beliefs in how they are extra members who have been born and grown up to have been taught to not disobey their mother. They have been restricted to stay within the boundaries of Mercy Hill and their mother earns $179,00 per year the youngest daughter Denise has informed the reader. They somehow have received education but also play in the woods building forts on the grounds of Mercy Hill. In the opening chapter Mimi and Denise have climbed a Magnolia tree so they can observe the HB95's who are in Ward C that houses the most dangerous inpatients that have among them murders who have been sent to Mercy Hill since they were deemed insane. It is where their mother works where she has her daughters attend the Assembly that has gathered to discuss whether Mercy Hill's future is to sell the grounds and close the hospital which Ward A is empty due to Federal and State funding has not allowed funding to reopen it in the budget. Dr. Lisa Cross has somehow taught her four young daughters to be in attendance at which they are well versed in their teens to memorize their mothers intellectual understanding of Washington DC history and economics which Denise has been taught at age ten years old to represent her mothers position that Mercy Hill's reasons to not close. The daughters seem to be already coached by their mother to have learned about how the book doesn't explain how they have learned adult level knowledge about President John F. Kennedy's stance on why he supported Mental Health and housing for patients to have access to receive treatment since his sister Rose was cited by Denise that she had been coached by her mother and the book doesn't contain more than how before their mother had her prepared to know she was going to speak as a adult representation of knowing exactly what she had known enough about economics and how she knew about Reagan's putting the Country in debt as if she was an adult whose presence along with her three older sisters were so poised as to add her mother's ideas being a stand in greater numbers who opposed the closure of being among able to have known as much as the other adults who thought it could be sold to developers turning Ward A into Condos or other uses which we only know is that her mother was behind using her daughter's representation that won. By winning it kept the hospital from being closed but that was never explained how her daughters learned adult level policy and this much is understood that is just one way their mother involved her daughters to help their mother by working at the hospital. There mother took them to Washington D.C. where they met a U. S. Senator to which MiMi stole a diamond Broach from his desk, and Denise lets the reader know that none of the sisters spoke about it. Obviously these girls have been taught by their mother that all four would attend Princeton and go on to work beside their mother as Psychiatrists and Dr. Lisa Cross had kept them from leaving the grounds and they have not attended school yet. As I type this her daughters are just as politically inclined as most adults but they all are next to volunteer to help in Ward B, doing whatever Nurse Jenny needs of them which is how they help their mother not that they ever question anything that their mother tells them, but their father is clearly the less domineering and the warmer and nurturing parent who is more likely to stick up for the girls. Denise tells the reader that in the beginning MiMi who is the rebellious sister fell out of the Magnolia Tree where Denise and her were watching the men in Ward C whose outdoor yard is covered in a fence with razor wire on top, and MiMi fell out of the tree and cut her face and arms in razor wire but landed on the inside of the more criminally insane and broke her leg. One of the men outside came over since she couldn't move and was trying to help but put his fingers over her bleeding face, and it was later learned after he was in there for murdering three boys and sent there because he was deemed insane. He was tackled to the ground and put zip ties and Denise said that he was trying to help, but Dr. Lisa Cross took MiMi to the hospital. When they returned their mother took a garbage bag and Threw away JJ's antique doll collection. Dr. Lisa Cross just put them to work in Ward B, and the patients weren't a danger to the girls, but they grew attached to a girl around their age who was in there for trying to commit suicide, and she was the most active and belligerent who kept running away. This is not a nice place and my observation was that once you were committed there you weren't given psychotherapy like the private hospitals, just medicated and there didn't seem to be any plan to rehabilitate you so you were in there for life. Denise tells you how these girls were affected. I just want to say that this place was in Raleigh, North Carolina. I thought the beginning started out slow, but the more I read the more hard it was to put down, and it really doesn't sensationalize these mentally ill patients since it's Literary Fiction it was very eye opening and beautifully written and it was an amazing debut that really was informative and it really was sad because the way these places ran people didn't get better, and if anything they got medicated with no release or the kind of place that was not like the private Mental Hospitals that were where I described where I visited my friend where you got to get voluntary intensive treatment with both psychotherapy and group therapy with Occupational therapy only if you had good health insurance. There was an art room where you could make ceramics and a Dining room where the food was delicious and you got to choose whatever you wanted to eat. I always wondered what our State hospital was where I heard horrible things like this, and I have no idea where it is, but here the food was mush and industrial common showers. I have no idea if that was closed, but when I went to visit my friend it was beautifully furnished with a lot of beautiful rooms to sit and talk. Here in this place these four sisters never had any formal schooling during their youth. They don't have any exposure to life except growing up with experience that's limited to life where they are all under knowing only believing institutionalization is their only exposure to be thinking that these patients were lucky. They do eventually get placed into school where they all skip two grades. This is really Denise's story and her three eldest sisters were all affected and I loved this which I think its another Spectacular debut which was amazing and informative, and I saw the difference between how the one that I visited my friend which I hope that they closed our State Mental hospital, as well. Today, most of the inpatient facilities even the private Mental hospitals are closed. The difference between insurance is what I described how nice it was, and this was very well described and atmospheric. This Author is so gifted and definitely one to watch for whatever she writes in the future I look forward to reading and I highly, highly recommend this as an Electrifying storytelling at its best which deserves to reach as wide of an audience as possible.
The author did get the timeline right, but where reality blurs with fiction is that the criminally insane were not kept in an average Mental hospital that treated everything from every type of depression to schizophrenia, and often substance abuse were not a danger to the other patients. I might be confusing the private Mental hospitals which I was familiar with because those you needed great health insurance and I thought while I visited a friend in a private one that they were nice, but that was out on the open ward which was well furnished and you could sit in private nicely furnished rooms which there were many and reminded me of a hotel. There was a private one that was about a half hour away which was about a half hour away from my house when I visited a friend there. That's the type of patients who were more of a harm to themselves that were among the other patients that I listed the diagnosed types of patients above. I visited the locked wards when she first checked in voluntarily where you had to earn your way to the hotel type of atmosphere, and they went through her belongings and kept certain things like sharp instruments such as disposable razors that were kept with items that weren't allowed but they could be signed out and this was during the 1980's, and this one has got to be a State Mental hospital that I know of two that this sounds like which I've known about one in our State where I never even knew where it was only that it was where people who didn't have health insurance. As I write this those State ones sounded dangerous and I heard they were dangerous so this one in the novel sounds like it was a State Mental hospital that had a reputation for having a place where it could be dangerous, and I did never know anyone there but it was nothing like the place where I visited. I know that the State run hospitals had a mixed population, but I always thought the criminally insane went to a place that was different, but I suppose they were where the criminally insane went. I took some time thinking about it and the clarity struck me as it was over fifty years ago that I have not thought about until I gained more clarity as I write this. Yes, I don't know if our State Mental hospital is closed, but I remembered reading and I thought the descriptions sounded like I would picture in my imagination this sounded more like a State Mental hospital that is if this one where the three older sisters are forced to help their mother who doesn't want the one in this book to close, so she is now forcing her three older daughters to prevent this one from closing, the youngest daughter narrates how her mother is pushing her three daughters to be under more pressure than usual, and the father really does speak up at times to stick up for his daughters. That made this all the more chilling since their Psychiatrist mother pushes her daughters harder now especially after an incident takes place that could cause it to be closed which the youngest daughter describes how things are in vivid detail, and how her sisters are affected, and all three elder ones were. This was a great premise that was cleverly imagined by this debut author who wrote with details that she had me feel sad that I finished it because it was gripping that kept my attention from start to finish with what makes me wonder if our State Mental hospital is closed, then where do they commit people involuntarily that don;t have the health insurance for a last resort? This goes into the type of detail as the youngest daughter observes and describes how her sisters are affected. I can see that this author did her research. I absolutely found this to be an outstanding, and very unique debut that seemed to be crafted by a much more experienced novelist. It is very well written that is captivating that showed an intellectual acumen by the writing with remarkable character development. I'll be recommending this to all of the readers I know who I think would be interested in this, and choosing it for the Book Club at my Local Library where I work and am the person who is in charge of running our Book Club, and there's about twenty six of us that will have a great discussion. I know that I'm going to be thinking about this for a very long time.
Publication Date: May 5, 2026! Available Now to Purchase!
Thank you to Net Galley, Hannah Thurman, and Doubleday Books for generously providing me with my ARC in exchange for a fair and honest review. All opinions are my own, as always.
#MercyHill #HannahThurman #DoubledayBooks #NetGalley
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
A complicated family drama set around the year 2000, in which four sisters grow up on the campus of a North Carolina mental hospital? Oh, and their mom is the head of psychiatry there? I jumped at the chance to read this debut fiction from Hannah Thurman.
The story is well done overall, and delivers in developing richly drawn characters, especially in the four sisters and their formidable mother. We see everything through the eyes of Denise, the youngest daughter. I wonder if multiple POVs would have complicated or broadened the novel’s perspective. However, I appreciated the timeframe chosen for the book’s setting. In the 1990s-early 2000s, mental health care changed dramatically in the US, and these changes are integrated into the story.
As promised, the girls come of age in their unique setting, and we are witness to the impacts. There are times that plot points feel forced vs smoothly integrated. And one major plot point is a massive content warning. Overall, I got the feeling that the novel was, in many ways, trying to do too much with plot, and not enough to connect emotionally. On the whole, however, I did enjoy it. If you like complicated family stories, and you’re not put off by some darker content, I’d recommend Mercy Hill. 3+ stars.
Thanks to Doubleday Books, the author, and NetGalley for providing this copy of Mercy Hill for review consideration. All opinions are my own.
Content Warnings: Pedophilia, Suicide
The story is well done overall, and delivers in developing richly drawn characters, especially in the four sisters and their formidable mother. We see everything through the eyes of Denise, the youngest daughter. I wonder if multiple POVs would have complicated or broadened the novel’s perspective. However, I appreciated the timeframe chosen for the book’s setting. In the 1990s-early 2000s, mental health care changed dramatically in the US, and these changes are integrated into the story.
As promised, the girls come of age in their unique setting, and we are witness to the impacts. There are times that plot points feel forced vs smoothly integrated. And one major plot point is a massive content warning. Overall, I got the feeling that the novel was, in many ways, trying to do too much with plot, and not enough to connect emotionally. On the whole, however, I did enjoy it. If you like complicated family stories, and you’re not put off by some darker content, I’d recommend Mercy Hill. 3+ stars.
Thanks to Doubleday Books, the author, and NetGalley for providing this copy of Mercy Hill for review consideration. All opinions are my own.
Content Warnings: Pedophilia, Suicide
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This book could be called “Fawning: What My Mommy Issues Taught Me - A Novel”. What a truly unique and captivating tale about the toll passion and duty takes on family. It was also a spotlight on how mental health has been viewed and weighed in America’s eyes. The pacing was a little slow and the build-up left me wanting, but a superb debut!
▹My ⭐ Rating: ★★★.5 out of 5
▹Format: 📱 eReader
Thank you kindly to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for an opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. This book comes out May 5, 2026.
─────────────────────────
○★○ What to Expect from This Book: ○★○
– About: The Cross sisters have lived their entire lives on the sprawling grounds of Mercy Hill, the embattled Raleigh mental hospital run by their formidable mother. Since childhood, JJ, Caro, Mimi, and Denise have been inculcated with their mother's mission: they'll work alongside her to protect Mercy Hill from the fate of other state hospitals across the country, which are being gutted and closed, one by one. As the sisters cross into adulthood, the pressures of their isolated environment and mercurial mother set them on different—and perilous—paths.
– Location: North Carolina
– POV: Single first-person (the youngest sister, Denise) told over the course of the late-1990s through the mid-2000s
– Spice: A few explicit scenes with minor details (but it may be disturbing to some readers due to the age of the character)
– Tropes: genius sisters, coming-of-age, mental health in America, historical fiction, complex family dynamics, unique upbringing, loyalty (to duty and to family)
– Content warning: peer pressure, sexual content with a minor, mental health advocates vs. the government, adultery (accusations but nothing on-page), suicide (not a MC and mostly off-page), grief, abuse (mentioned), a demanding mother
– Representation: criminals with mental health issues, caretakers, mental health facilities and those that advocate for better rights
─────────────────────────
↻ ◁ || ▷ ↺ 1:00 ──ㅇ────── 4:12
Now Playing: My Girls by Animal Collective
─────────────────────────
★○ If You Like the Following, You Might Like This Book ○★
➼ Vibes similar to Girl, Interrupted but instead of the female characters being institutionalized, they are four sisters growing up on the grounds of the mental health facility
➼ Stories about people who give their all to their field of work (maybe to their detriment), but are trying to make a difference for the greater good
─────────────────────────
⍟»This or That«⍟
Character Driven————✧———————Plot Driven
Light/Fluffy——————✧—————Heavy/Emotional
─────────────────────────
🎯 My Thoughts:
A truly superb debut about four sisters growing up in a strange environment. I was interested in the fact that these four sisters were all geniuses and yet somehow stunted by their upbringing.
The demanding mother, the almost emotionally unavailable stay-at-home father, the very intriguing characters in the different wards…it all made up a cast of people that had their own stories to tell. But I loved that this was told through the eyes of the youngest sister. In the beginning, you really got the sense that she was just going about life trying to please everyone like children sometimes do, and then throughout the book you watch her grow and that narrative changes a bit. It hardens as she learns not only the impact of the games of the government, but how her relationships change with peers, with her sisters, and with her parents.
There were times I questioned the sanity of all characters and thought maybe this was going to veer into a mystery, but at its core, this is really about the ripple effect of what people will do to stay loyal to their cause. Even if it comes at the expense of family.
I feel, however, that the pacing ultimately did me no favors here. It felt drug out at times and then the ending felt so sudden. But I have a shorter attention span than some readers, so if you enjoy drawn out details that add color to the story but perhaps don’t advance the plot, then you won’t struggle with that part as much as I did.
Would I Recommend?: Maybe to yes. I think it had such an important message about mental health that I want people to read it, but I recognize it also won’t be for everyone.
•♥Consider following me on Instagram @kelseyreviewsbooks for more visual content and bookish discussions.♥•
▹My ⭐ Rating: ★★★.5 out of 5
▹Format: 📱 eReader
Thank you kindly to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for an opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. This book comes out May 5, 2026.
─────────────────────────
○★○ What to Expect from This Book: ○★○
– About: The Cross sisters have lived their entire lives on the sprawling grounds of Mercy Hill, the embattled Raleigh mental hospital run by their formidable mother. Since childhood, JJ, Caro, Mimi, and Denise have been inculcated with their mother's mission: they'll work alongside her to protect Mercy Hill from the fate of other state hospitals across the country, which are being gutted and closed, one by one. As the sisters cross into adulthood, the pressures of their isolated environment and mercurial mother set them on different—and perilous—paths.
– Location: North Carolina
– POV: Single first-person (the youngest sister, Denise) told over the course of the late-1990s through the mid-2000s
– Spice: A few explicit scenes with minor details (but it may be disturbing to some readers due to the age of the character)
– Tropes: genius sisters, coming-of-age, mental health in America, historical fiction, complex family dynamics, unique upbringing, loyalty (to duty and to family)
– Content warning: peer pressure, sexual content with a minor, mental health advocates vs. the government, adultery (accusations but nothing on-page), suicide (not a MC and mostly off-page), grief, abuse (mentioned), a demanding mother
– Representation: criminals with mental health issues, caretakers, mental health facilities and those that advocate for better rights
─────────────────────────
↻ ◁ || ▷ ↺ 1:00 ──ㅇ────── 4:12
Now Playing: My Girls by Animal Collective
╰┈➤ ❝I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things, like my social status, I just want four walls and adobe slats for my girls❞
─────────────────────────
★○ If You Like the Following, You Might Like This Book ○★
➼ Vibes similar to Girl, Interrupted but instead of the female characters being institutionalized, they are four sisters growing up on the grounds of the mental health facility
➼ Stories about people who give their all to their field of work (maybe to their detriment), but are trying to make a difference for the greater good
─────────────────────────
⍟»This or That«⍟
Character Driven————✧———————Plot Driven
Light/Fluffy——————✧—————Heavy/Emotional
─────────────────────────
🎯 My Thoughts:
A truly superb debut about four sisters growing up in a strange environment. I was interested in the fact that these four sisters were all geniuses and yet somehow stunted by their upbringing.
The demanding mother, the almost emotionally unavailable stay-at-home father, the very intriguing characters in the different wards…it all made up a cast of people that had their own stories to tell. But I loved that this was told through the eyes of the youngest sister. In the beginning, you really got the sense that she was just going about life trying to please everyone like children sometimes do, and then throughout the book you watch her grow and that narrative changes a bit. It hardens as she learns not only the impact of the games of the government, but how her relationships change with peers, with her sisters, and with her parents.
There were times I questioned the sanity of all characters and thought maybe this was going to veer into a mystery, but at its core, this is really about the ripple effect of what people will do to stay loyal to their cause. Even if it comes at the expense of family.
I feel, however, that the pacing ultimately did me no favors here. It felt drug out at times and then the ending felt so sudden. But I have a shorter attention span than some readers, so if you enjoy drawn out details that add color to the story but perhaps don’t advance the plot, then you won’t struggle with that part as much as I did.
Would I Recommend?: Maybe to yes. I think it had such an important message about mental health that I want people to read it, but I recognize it also won’t be for everyone.
•♥Consider following me on Instagram @kelseyreviewsbooks for more visual content and bookish discussions.♥•
April 11, 2026
Mercy Hill by Hannah Thurman is a recommended debut domestic drama/coming-of-age novel following a dysfunctional family of four sisters, their domineering mother, and easy-going father.
Starting in 1999 the narrative follows psychiatrist Dr. Lisa Cross, her husband Tucker Palmer, and their four daughters, J.J. (13), Caro (12), Mimi (10), and Denise (9). The family lives in an isolated setting, in a cottage on the grounds of Mercy Hill, the state mental hospital in Raleigh where their mother is the head of psychiatry. As state mental hospitals are being closed across the country, Dr. Lisa Cross is single-mindedly determined to keep Mercy Hill open and expects her daughters to become doctors and work with her as part of her plan to protect the hospital. Part of her plan involves enrolling her four daughters in a magnate school, two grades above their level, without any thought to the emotional and social effects. Tucker reluctantly agrees to the plan. She even has the girls volunteer to help at the hospital which leads to distressing results.
This is a worthwhile debut novel in the sense that it explores the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters. Thurman also does a good job creating an atmospheric setting. Setting the novel over 5 years was to show the end of an institution in real time, which it does, but it also shows a family crumbling due to unrealistic expectations and demands placed on everyone by Lisa. Youngest daughter Denise Cross is the narrator of the story and her account shows her sister's struggles, along with her own.
After a reasonably strong and interesting start the narrative begins to flounder a bit. Their mother, Lisa Cross, is quite simply an authoritarian bully. All her daughters have her last name rather than their father's and she has plans for all the girl's without even a modicum of thought about their own personal strengths and interests. This also has Denise starting college at 14.
As the plot developed, the novel veered toward a new adult novel and my interest waned. At the same time, the plot slowed down and began to feel imitative and forced, as if it had to meet a list of expectations. Additionally, there are two major plot elements that simple stretch all credulity. All four of the girls being brilliant and allowed to skip two grade levels in a magnate school is unrealistic. period. The same is true of them being allowed to volunteer at the state hospital. No matter who their mother is, this is incredulous. 3.5 rounded down.
Mercy Hill is a good choice for those who enjoy domestic drama/coming-of-age novel featuring a dysfunctional family. Thanks to Doubleday for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2026/0...
Starting in 1999 the narrative follows psychiatrist Dr. Lisa Cross, her husband Tucker Palmer, and their four daughters, J.J. (13), Caro (12), Mimi (10), and Denise (9). The family lives in an isolated setting, in a cottage on the grounds of Mercy Hill, the state mental hospital in Raleigh where their mother is the head of psychiatry. As state mental hospitals are being closed across the country, Dr. Lisa Cross is single-mindedly determined to keep Mercy Hill open and expects her daughters to become doctors and work with her as part of her plan to protect the hospital. Part of her plan involves enrolling her four daughters in a magnate school, two grades above their level, without any thought to the emotional and social effects. Tucker reluctantly agrees to the plan. She even has the girls volunteer to help at the hospital which leads to distressing results.
This is a worthwhile debut novel in the sense that it explores the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters. Thurman also does a good job creating an atmospheric setting. Setting the novel over 5 years was to show the end of an institution in real time, which it does, but it also shows a family crumbling due to unrealistic expectations and demands placed on everyone by Lisa. Youngest daughter Denise Cross is the narrator of the story and her account shows her sister's struggles, along with her own.
After a reasonably strong and interesting start the narrative begins to flounder a bit. Their mother, Lisa Cross, is quite simply an authoritarian bully. All her daughters have her last name rather than their father's and she has plans for all the girl's without even a modicum of thought about their own personal strengths and interests. This also has Denise starting college at 14.
As the plot developed, the novel veered toward a new adult novel and my interest waned. At the same time, the plot slowed down and began to feel imitative and forced, as if it had to meet a list of expectations. Additionally, there are two major plot elements that simple stretch all credulity. All four of the girls being brilliant and allowed to skip two grade levels in a magnate school is unrealistic. period. The same is true of them being allowed to volunteer at the state hospital. No matter who their mother is, this is incredulous. 3.5 rounded down.
Mercy Hill is a good choice for those who enjoy domestic drama/coming-of-age novel featuring a dysfunctional family. Thanks to Doubleday for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2026/0...
September 30, 2025
Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for this advance reader’s copy, in exchange for an honest review. “Mercy Hill” is scheduled for release on May 5, 2026.
Every parent wants the best for their kids, and often will push or steer them in what they feel is the right direction.
But can parents push too vehemently?
That’s a good question to ponder in discussing Hannah Thurman’s debut novel, “Mercy Hill.” It’s a story about four sisters, their domineering mother who is the head psychiatrist at a mental health facility in North Carolina, and their evolving relationships.
And it’s pretty darn good.
The story is told through the eyes of Denise, the youngest of the Cross sisters (age 9 at the start of the story), but revolves heavily around the other three – J.J., Caro and Mimi – and their highly motivated mother, Lisa. The latter is driven to ensure each of her daughters excels academically and expects them to follow in her footsteps by attending medical school. She also ‘enhances their resumes’ by having them volunteer at the asylum afternoons and during the summer – even though the two youngest, Denise and Mimi, are only 9- and 11-years old, respectively.
But it becomes clear early on that at least three of them have no desire to follow in their mother’s path. The more their mother pushes them – which includes cajoling school administrators to have the girls skip several grades at a time – the more the girls push back. Rebellion that in some cases becomes violent.
It’s also clear that in many respects, while the girls certainly excel academically, their social skills and understanding of the ‘real world’ are lacking. Not surprising given that Denise finds herself graduating high school and heading off to college at age 14-1/2. As she says to a fellow freshman shortly after arriving at New York’s Columbia University, “I don’t have any friends.”
Character development for the four sisters is solid, even if only seen through Denise’s eyes. But why is their mother so rigid and domineering? Thurman provides a brief glimpse into Lisa’s upbringing when her ailing father comes to visit, but it’s brief. Seeing the relationship through Lisa’s eyes might have been beneficial.
In addition, some of the situations the sisters found themselves in – such as running around unsupervised while volunteering at the asylum – were a bit implausible.
Overall, though, “Mercy Hill” is a solid debut novel and a worthwhile read. Four stars for an interesting examination of family values, dynamics and relationships.
And you can check out all of my reviews at my Raised on Reading (www.raisedonreading.com) book blog.
Every parent wants the best for their kids, and often will push or steer them in what they feel is the right direction.
But can parents push too vehemently?
That’s a good question to ponder in discussing Hannah Thurman’s debut novel, “Mercy Hill.” It’s a story about four sisters, their domineering mother who is the head psychiatrist at a mental health facility in North Carolina, and their evolving relationships.
And it’s pretty darn good.
The story is told through the eyes of Denise, the youngest of the Cross sisters (age 9 at the start of the story), but revolves heavily around the other three – J.J., Caro and Mimi – and their highly motivated mother, Lisa. The latter is driven to ensure each of her daughters excels academically and expects them to follow in her footsteps by attending medical school. She also ‘enhances their resumes’ by having them volunteer at the asylum afternoons and during the summer – even though the two youngest, Denise and Mimi, are only 9- and 11-years old, respectively.
But it becomes clear early on that at least three of them have no desire to follow in their mother’s path. The more their mother pushes them – which includes cajoling school administrators to have the girls skip several grades at a time – the more the girls push back. Rebellion that in some cases becomes violent.
It’s also clear that in many respects, while the girls certainly excel academically, their social skills and understanding of the ‘real world’ are lacking. Not surprising given that Denise finds herself graduating high school and heading off to college at age 14-1/2. As she says to a fellow freshman shortly after arriving at New York’s Columbia University, “I don’t have any friends.”
Character development for the four sisters is solid, even if only seen through Denise’s eyes. But why is their mother so rigid and domineering? Thurman provides a brief glimpse into Lisa’s upbringing when her ailing father comes to visit, but it’s brief. Seeing the relationship through Lisa’s eyes might have been beneficial.
In addition, some of the situations the sisters found themselves in – such as running around unsupervised while volunteering at the asylum – were a bit implausible.
Overall, though, “Mercy Hill” is a solid debut novel and a worthwhile read. Four stars for an interesting examination of family values, dynamics and relationships.
And you can check out all of my reviews at my Raised on Reading (www.raisedonreading.com) book blog.
September 15, 2025
There’s something about growing up in a place that is falling apart that shapes who you become and something even more powerful about being told from childhood that it’s your job to save it. Mercy Hill is a deeply compelling debut from Hannah Thurman, a story not only of four sisters and the hospital they call home, but of what happens when a mother’s mission becomes her daughters’ inheritance. It’s not just any hospital, it’s a mental institution and it is their home with their mother as its controlling head of psychiatry. Denise, the youngest and narrator, carries the weight of expectation like a hand-me-down white coat too big, a little threadbare, but impossible to take off. The novel is rich with moments that ache and linger, and there’s a quiet brilliance in how Thurman captures the slow unraveling of a family under pressure.
The characters are drawn with both sharpness and grace. Mimi, Caro, J.J., and Denise each react to their upbringing in different ways, and their personalities crackle most vividly in the dialogue especially after Caro’s religious revelation. The shared trauma they experience throughout the years The Girl being a big one felt like we needed more thoughtful moments. Denise’s teenage entanglement with Skate is one of those storylines where you want to reach into the book and shout. The relationship between the girls feels true. These girls hurt each other, try to protect each other, misunderstand and try to save each other. Like real sisters do.
The mother Lisa is a woman so committed to her mission that she doesn’t see how she’s consuming her children in the process. Lisa believes she's saving the hospital, but what’s most haunting is how convinced she is that this sacrifice including her daughters' childhoods is noble. As the head of psychiatry at Mercy Hill and the matriarch of the Cross family, she looms over every decision her daughters make whether she's in the room or not.
If anything, I wanted more of the sisters together. I wanted more space for their conversations, especially in the later years. Still, Mercy Hill is a beautifully written exploration of generational weight, institutional failure, and familial love that refuses to look away. It is a story that carries some historical weight about state hospitals.
Thank you to NetGalley, Hannah Thurman, and Penguin Random House for the opportunity to read this debut and for the ARC.
The characters are drawn with both sharpness and grace. Mimi, Caro, J.J., and Denise each react to their upbringing in different ways, and their personalities crackle most vividly in the dialogue especially after Caro’s religious revelation. The shared trauma they experience throughout the years The Girl being a big one felt like we needed more thoughtful moments. Denise’s teenage entanglement with Skate is one of those storylines where you want to reach into the book and shout. The relationship between the girls feels true. These girls hurt each other, try to protect each other, misunderstand and try to save each other. Like real sisters do.
The mother Lisa is a woman so committed to her mission that she doesn’t see how she’s consuming her children in the process. Lisa believes she's saving the hospital, but what’s most haunting is how convinced she is that this sacrifice including her daughters' childhoods is noble. As the head of psychiatry at Mercy Hill and the matriarch of the Cross family, she looms over every decision her daughters make whether she's in the room or not.
If anything, I wanted more of the sisters together. I wanted more space for their conversations, especially in the later years. Still, Mercy Hill is a beautifully written exploration of generational weight, institutional failure, and familial love that refuses to look away. It is a story that carries some historical weight about state hospitals.
Thank you to NetGalley, Hannah Thurman, and Penguin Random House for the opportunity to read this debut and for the ARC.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 146 reviews