Mercury Boys
History and the speculative collide with the modern world when a group of high school girls form a secret society after discovering they can communicate with boys from the past, in this powerful look at female desire, jealousy, and the shifting lines between friendship and rivalry.

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, but she’s also 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.
1138018993
Mercury Boys
History and the speculative collide with the modern world when a group of high school girls form a secret society after discovering they can communicate with boys from the past, in this powerful look at female desire, jealousy, and the shifting lines between friendship and rivalry.

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, but she’s also 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.
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Mercury Boys

Mercury Boys

by Chandra Prasad
Mercury Boys

Mercury Boys

by Chandra Prasad

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$10.99 
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Overview

History and the speculative collide with the modern world when a group of high school girls form a secret society after discovering they can communicate with boys from the past, in this powerful look at female desire, jealousy, and the shifting lines between friendship and rivalry.

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, but she’s also 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781641293877
Publisher: Soho Press, Incorporated
Publication date: 07/05/2022
Pages: 360
Product dimensions: 5.52(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.97(d)
Age Range: 14 - 17 Years

About the Author

Chandra Prasad is the author of the critically acclaimed novels On Borrowed Wings, Death of a Circus, Breathe the Sky, and Damselfly, a female-driven young adult text used in classrooms in parallel with Lord of the Flies. Prasad is also the editor of—and a contributor to—Mixed, the first-ever anthology of short stories on the multiracial experience. Her shorter works have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Week, New Haven Noir, and Teen Voices, among others.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE
 
 
Obsessions usually begin in a fiery cauldron of anger, jealousy, love, or revenge, but Saskia Brown’s started in an ordinary high school classroom with bored students and a scuffed linoleum floor.
     The class was Early American Innovation and Ingenuity. She’d decided to take it because it sounded hopeful and exciting, and also because it was Pass/Fail. Only last week she and her father had left Arizona and driven thirty-seven hours to Coventon, Connecticut. Though they were mostly settled into their new home, she still felt discombobulated. Better not to overload herself at school, she figured. Better to start slow. Next year, when she had the lay of the land, she could take some AP classes and really push herself.
     Besides, there was only a month left in the school year. She hadn’t even wanted to start at Coventon High so close to summertime. But her dad had insisted.
     “Better to keep busy,” he’d said.
     To Saskia, it sounded like the same advice he probably gave himself. Keep your mind occupied. Don’t think about Mom.
     The teacher, Mr. Nash, wasn’t young, but he acted like he was . . . in a good way. He jumped from topic to topic at a pace that made her head spin. He got excited when he talked, gesturing with his hands, occasionally pumping his fists in the air. His job hadn’t made him jaded and cynical like other teachers his age.
     The last assignment of the year was to study little-known American pioneers. Mr. Nash had the kids draw names out of a hat. Saskia got a guy named Robert Cornelius. She’d never heard of him. Now she had less than two weeks to research and write a ten-page report and prepare a fifteen-minute oral presentation on him. Back at her old school, giving a presentation wouldn’t have been a problem. She’d been outgoing. Extroverted. But here, all she wanted to do was blend in.
     No, strike that—all she wanted to do was fade into the background.
     Because faded is exactly how I feel, she thought.
     Sitting back down, she shoved the scrap of paper aside. She glanced at her bland gray T-shirt and bare, chewed-down fingernails. In her old town, she’d worn black and silver nail polish. She’d had a pair of jeans that she’d splashed with colored paint, Jackson Pollock–style. Sometimes she’d scrawl words she liked on her T-shirts: agnostic, sensory overload, Rasputin, continental drift, abacus, ambrosia, mercenary. Back then, she hadn’t been afraid to stand out. Not that she’d been super popular. But she’d been fine with that. Fine with being herself: the girl who watched too many old movies; who had a tendency to daydream; whose big, curly, uncontrollable hair seemed to have a mind of its own. The one no one could quite pigeonhole. (“Is she Black?” “Nah, her dad’s white.” “Yeah, but her mom’s not.”)
     Those days seemed liked ancient history now. They had even before the move.
     After word of her mom’s affair leaked out, lots of her so-called friends abandoned her, gossiped behind her back. They’d called her mom a cradle snatcher. And Saskia couldn’t deny it. Her fifty-year-old mother was seeing a twenty-four-year-old. Gross. Since Saskia had left Arizona, not a single one of her friends had called or texted to make sure she was okay. Not even her best friend, Heather. That hurt a lot. It upset her almost as much her mom’s infidelity.
     Heather had been unpredictable, maybe even reckless, but Saskia had adored her. The bottom line was that Heather knew how to have fun—and Saskia had fun with her. During one memorable sleepover, they’d made White Russians at Heather’s house on the down-low after her parents had gone to sleep. There hadn’t been any milk, so they’d used cream. Small sips, Heather had said encouragingly, when Saskia admitted she’d never tried alcohol  before. She remembered vomiting as quietly as possible, her stomach churning, hoping the noise wouldn’t wake up Heather’s parents. She remembered laughing so hard her ribs hurt.
     But she also remembered the final text Heather had sent her. Last minute, her supposed best friend had canceled their plans to hang out. Again. Heather had blamed a sore throat, but Saskia had seen her at school that very day, and she’d seemed fine: lively, a little hyper, very Heather-ish. So it was pretty obvious she was blowing Saskia off.
     It would have been better if Heather had just come out and said it: “I don’t want to be your friend anymore. Your family is hella embarrassing.
     Better to rip off the Band-Aid all at once, Saskia thought now.
 
 
During free period she went to the library and googled “Robert Cornelius” on her laptop. She scanned the entries and picked up some basic info. Cornelius was a pioneer in early photography. He’d worked with photos known as daguerreotypes. His family owned a prosperous gas and lighting company. He had expertise in chemistry and metallurgy. Metallurgy? She made a mental note to look that up later, as well as “daguerreotypes.”
     She clicked on “images,” not expecting much, but getting an eyeful. The same grainy, black-and-white photo appeared over and over again. “Robert Cornelius: Self-Portrait,” the captions read. Here was a striking young man with an intense, arresting stare. His arms were crossed defiantly. The collar of his dark coat was turned up. He looked, frankly, like a nineteenth-century badass.
     She heard a whistle from behind.
     Whipping around, she saw Lila Defensor, her new friend—scratch that, her only friend—at Coventon High. Lila was small, not even five feet. Fun-sized, she called herself. Her freckles, hair, and eyes were all the exact same color of dark amber, a synchronicity that was offset by the bright earrings and headbands she usually wore.
     Saskia had gravitated toward Lila the second she’d seen her. Walking near each other in a hallway, they had rolled their eyes in tandem at a girl leaning against her locker, pouting and preening as she took selfies. “That’s a serious commitment to self-absorption,” Lila had whispered to Saskia, who’d known at that moment that she and Lila were like two Twix bars in the same wrapper.
     Like Saskia, Lila had little patience for shallow people. But unlike Saskia, Lila radiated confidence and self-possession. Even her sassy cherry-red glasses screamed smart and quirky rather than socially inept. The fact that Lila had a part-time job at Western Connecticut State and got to hang around college students only added to her coolness quotient.
     “He’s not bad for a dead guy,” Lila said, gazing at Robert Cornelius. “He is dead, right?”
     “Yeah, he’s gotta be. This is from, like, the 1800s.”
     “Who is he?” Lila leaned closer to Saskia’s screen.
     Saskia told her what little she knew, adding, “I guess that photo’s the first self-portrait ever taken.”
     Lila stared unblinking for several seconds, her eyes both lively and contemplative. Suddenly her face lit up in recognition. “Wait a minute; I’ve seen this photo before! It’s in the library where I work.”
      “Seriously?”
      “Yeah, Western Connecticut has an archive of thousands of old photos: tintypes, Carte de Visites, Cabinet Cards, cyanotypes, ambrotypes, daguerreotypes. It’s, like, the second biggest in the country.”
      “Random.”
      “Completely. That’s got to be a daguerreotype, right?”
     Saskia was impressed. “It is. How’d you know . . . and what the heck is a daguerreotype?”
     “I’ve been working at the archive a year now, so I’ve had to learn out of necessity. Don’t want to get fired, right? Daguerreotypes were made on sheets of copper plated with a coat of silver. Photography back then was complicated.”
     Lila dropped her backpack on the floor with a thunk and slumped into a seat. The unzippered pack revealed a trove of thick, heavy books. Saskia didn’t know how she hauled them all around. “What did you do,” Saskia asked, “take the college library with you?”
     “Pretty much.”
     “Ever hear of a Kindle?”
     “I’m old-school,” Lila said. “I like the smell of old paper and dust.” She took a book out and sniffed the binding.
     Saskia laughed. “Weirdo.”
     Lila didn’t react. She was gazing at the screen again, a pensive look on her face. “Hey, I hate to break this to you, but I just realized something. By taking this picture, Cornelius basically invented the selfie.”
     “Oh my god, you’re right!”
     Saskia and Lila looked at each other and burst out laughing. When they’d regained their composure, Lila said, “I could show you the photo in the archive, if you want . . .”
     “You could smuggle me in?”
     “Don’t you want to see the actual daguerreotype?”
     Saskia nodded. “Yeah, of course, but I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
      “I like to live on the edge,” Lila joked. She pulled out a Western Connecticut State employee ID card she kept dangling on a chain around her neck. “For real, it’s no problem; I’ve got access. And the security guard there—Rich—he loves me.”
      “And you’re absolutely sure this guy Cornelius is there?”
     Both girls again looked at the image on the smudged screen of Saskia’s laptop. They felt the weight of the man’s stare. Saskia sensed he was almost challenging her.
      “I’m sure,” Lila replied, adjusting her vivid ikat headband. “I never forget a pretty face.”

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