YA Book Club reads Mercury Boys with visit from author Chandra Prasad

YA Book Club is hybrid this year! Join us each month to discuss a book we've all read, either on Zoom or at TCPL! Participants will receive a free copy of each month's book to keep. Bring suggestions of books to read to the meeting so we can all read books we're excited about!

This month we're reading Mercury Boys by Chandra Prasad and the author will be visiting us via Zoom during the meeting!

Registration is required. All participants will receive the Zoom link after registration and may choose whether to join us in person (masks and social distancing required) or virtually. 

A synopsis of Mercury Boys:

After her life is upended by divorce and a cross-country move, 16-year-old Saskia Brown feels like an outsider at her new school—not only is she a transplant, she’s biracial in a population of mostly white students. One day while visiting her only friend at her part-time library job, Saskia encounters a vial of liquid mercury, then touches an old daguerreotype—the precursor of the modern-day photograph—and makes a startling discovery. She is somehow able to visit the man in the portrait: Robert Cornelius, a brilliant young inventor from the nineteenth century. The hitch: she can see him only in her dreams.

Saskia shares her revelation with some classmates, hoping to find connection and friendship among strangers. Under her guidance, the other girls steal portraits of young men from a local college's daguerreotype collection and try the dangerous experiment for themselves. Soon, they each form a bond with their own "Mercury Boy," from an injured Union soldier to a charming pickpocket in New York City.

At night, the girls visit the boys in their dreams. During the day, they hold clandestine meetings of their new secret society. At first, the Mercury Boys Club is a thrilling diversion from their troubled everyday lives, but it's not long before jealousy, violence, and secrets threaten everything the girls hold dear.