Mary: Come travel back in time with YA Book Club as we discuss Mercury Boys by Chandra Prasad. The book follows Saskia, who just moved to a new state with her dad and is settling into a new school. She reflects that she hasn’t really had many genuine friends during her life, and she’s excited to become close with Lila, who seems very cool and level headed IMO. Lila works at a college library, where she has access to all sorts of archival daguerreotypes.
And that’s where we get into the main conceit of the novel. Saskia, Lila, and a group of popular girls form an unlikely alliance they call the Mercury Boys Club. They all pick a “forever boyfriend” from one of the daguerreotypes in Lila’s library, take that picture home (through THEFT) and then sleep with the picture in order to travel through time to the past and meet said forever boyfriend. That premise sounds exciting and just plain old out there, but I’ll say up front that I didn’t find this novel super interesting, sadly.
Emily: This premise sounded interesting, but the actual execution of the premise made zero sense. Basically, you get a whole bunch of teen girls fangirling over pictures of old white dudes? And in one instance a woman? I would say maybe I’m just not the audience for this, but I don’t feel like this is something I would have found interesting even when I was a teen. I just assumed based on the synopsis that this story was going to go a little further than just like time-traveling boyfriends. But that was really… it.
Mary: I don’t even really know where to begin because I both have a LOT and NOTHING to say about this book. On one hand, I felt really interested in Saskia’s personal plotline. I understand how she would feel betrayed by her mother, who had an affair with a much younger substitute teacher and then broke up the family over it. I also understand that moving to a new place is scary. Then, we’ve got Saskia’s added worries about being somewhat of a late bloomer, not really having any real friends, and being an all-around nerd. And, yeah, that hit me hard! However, Saskia’s plot is kind of in the background for a lot of the novel, and almost always informed by her interactions with the Mercury Boys Club or her time in the past, which sort of cheapened it to me. Was there any particular plot that stuck out to you? Or something you found redeeming?
Emily: I was also intrigued by her family storyline, because I had a similar situation when I was a teenager. My mom left my dad for a much younger grad student. And I liked exploring how she felt like she didn’t fit in and how this club gave her a sense of belonging. But I really had difficulty believing that this club would actually be a thing. And turns out (spoiler) it’s not really a thing. But more on that later. Anyway, what about you?
Mean girls are mean. We’ve learned this.
Mary: I agree that that’s one of the more interesting storylines in the novel, and I also agree that this club would absolutely never exist. It wouldn’t exist for a few reasons. Sure, you can’t travel back in time with daguerreotypes, but also the whole construction of the group is really suspicious. I mean, the popular girls just started hanging out with the unpopular weird girls? No. I’ve seen enough teen comedies to know that’s not going to work. I thought, for just a minute, that the book was going to show that the popular girls were much more complex and “normal” for lack of a better word, but...no. They were just straight up sociopaths.
Emily: Yeah, I hated that so much.
Mary: So the whole conceit of the book is that the girls play with a drop of mercury (or eat it?), sleep holding a daguerreotype, then they get to travel through time to the past. Do we ever really get any confirmation that’s what’s actually happening, though? I’m not sure Saskia ever knows that she’s actually going into the past, and there’s not any evidence to suggest that the whole thing’s more than a vivid dream. So...is that cool? Can we just not explain things now? Does it even matter?
Emily: The whole time I was really just like “are they not just getting mercury poisoning?” Like what would possess you to do this? Because you can experience hallucinations with mercury poisoning. This would be extreme, but honestly that’s what I thought was happening the whole time, and I kept waiting for this reveal that this was all in their heads. The whole thing was just really messed up, but that was never really explored in an interesting way, which was so disappointing.
Mary: I think that it takes a lot of extended exposure to get full on mercury poisoning, but like...they’d still probably have some symptoms? I’m not sure. Either way, it seemed like Saskia was simultaneously too worried about it and the other girls were not worried enough about it.
The ending of “Mercury Boys” tries to reveal a huge twist by claiming that Paige was playing some long game to fool Saskia and hurt her feelings (you know, as retaliation for hooking up with her then-ex-boyfriend). In hindsight, this checks out, especially considering that Paige never said much about her forever boyfriend and clearly wasn’t going to see him. That being said, this is absolutely ridiculous and I didn’t buy it for one second. As someone who has, you know, interacted with youths, this is just simply not how they operate. Either Paige is a serious sociopath or this is too much.
Emily: Yeah, so at the beginning of the novel, Saskia accidentally makes out with Paige’s boyfriend. I say “accidentally” because she didn’t know he and Paige were together. And the dude ended up being a total loser, but obviously Paige is still hung up on him. But basically what we end up with is a story about girls obsessing over boys. Old daguerreotype boys and/or young idiot boys. Neither kind of boy do I find very compelling. And, sure, I’m okay with stories about girls being interested in boys, but when they have nothing else going on? It just seemed like Saskia could have had a much more interesting story about self-identity and discovery through time travel rather than whatever this was.
When we picked up this book, what were you expecting, and how does it compare to what we ended up getting? Because clearly this isn’t what I was expecting. In a bad way.
Mary: Yes, big agree. I wondered several times when I was reading this, “Does this book pass the Bechdel test?” The girls spend the entire novel talking about boys, thinking about boys, traveling through time to see boys (supposedly). It’s all exhausting because they really don’t seem to have a life outside of boys, and that’s just not good on any level. It’s not good, and it’s also not interesting.
Real talk, I spent so much of the novel confused if Saskia had sex with Josh or just made out with him. I’m forever confused by what “hooking up” means.
Emily: Haha, true. Maybe they did have sex. This is why “hooking up” should just mean sex. If you say “hooking up” to mean making out OR having sex, then it really doesn’t give us much information. Just say you made out if you made out. And say you hooked up if you hooked up. Anyway, either way this dude was no good. I don’t even remember his name anymore because I read the book over a week ago, and it was an audiobook, so I don’t feel like checking. Also I don’t care.
It was Josh.
Mary: Also, YES, this wasn’t what I was expecting either, in an extremely bad way. It seems like the novel just stops being interested in the daguerreotype folks after Saskia “breaks up” with Cornelius. They never investigate if it was all real or not, and I feel like in a novel like this you have to. If you’re going to have a book with supernatural elements, you either need to explain it or leave it deliciously ambiguous. You can’t just drop it with no reasoning.
Speaking of Cornelius, BOY I have a lot of questions about why Saskia was so into him or what the whole deal with him is. I mean, I hate to say it, but how likely is it that a white man in the 1800s would be like, COOL, a Black girl with weird clothes, I’m IN! I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief into thinking that race just didn’t matter to him. What did you think about the actual “time travel?”
Emily: Yeah, I didn’t believe this “romance” for one second, nor did I care about it. And I wondered if Cornelius was even into Saskia in that way? Also, how are we supposed to root for a romance with a dude named Cornelius? Wow, the more we talk about this, the more I think to myself, WTF even was this?
I think the book was trying to be cute by never saying for sure whether the time travel was “real” or not, but I just found that extra annoying. If we don’t know if it’s real or not, then I don’t really understand what I’m supposed to take away from any of it, and I left the book thinking, “Well, I just listened to a whole pile of nothing and that twist was dumb.” I hate to be this mean about it, but I think this book single-handedly caused my October reading slump.
Mary: Yeah, it wasn’t cute at all. You can’t be precious about the main conceit of the novel! I’ll admit though that I didn’t particularly care if it was real or not because by the end of the novel I was just OVER it.
I think this also caused a weird reading slump for me, too. On so many levels, Mercury Boys didn’t work for me. The pacing was weird, the plot didn’t make sense and didn’t respect its own twists and turns, and it honestly just wasn’t super well written. I hate to be insulting about it, but I just really, really did not enjoy this book. I think I gave it a 2 on Goodreads because it wasn’t the WORST thing I’ve ever read, but I also didn’t take any pleasure in it.
Emily: I also gave it a 2. What are we reading next?
Mary: Yes! Next time we are going to be joined by none other than Susan to discuss Those Who Prey by Jennifer Moffett! I’m pumped to pick up this novel, and happy Susan’s going to join us for a YA Book Club. Also, it's cover is great.
