In Sally Cooper’s debut novel, Love Object, young Mercy Brewer is thrown into a state of confusion when her mother is hospitalized with a serious mental illness. The girl’s ability to communicate, especially with males, proves difficult, and the possibility haunts Mercy that she may be suffering from her mother’s affliction. To make matters worse, her father retreats into silence, while her brother seeks solace by dressing up in women’s clothing.

Cooper possesses an extraordinary eye for detail, describing objects and settings with precise and often beautiful language. In a series of deft strokes, she reveals her characters’ internal lives with sensitivity and imagination, inducing empathy in the reader. Under Cooper’s skillful guidance, Mercy’s longing for her mother, and ultimate rejection of her, seem believable and necessary.

Cooper’s capacity for description, however, seems to come at a cost. While the narrative involves the reader on the microscopic level, Cooper has not combined the story’s elements into a credible whole. The novel covers a period of five years – Mercy is 12 at the onset of her mother’s illness, and narrates the story as a 17-year-old – but the transitions from past to present are occasionally awkward and Mercy’s development from child into young adult is presented in bare outline.

Powerful episodes are also left by the wayside. When Mercy is persecuted at summer camp, the experience barely surfaces later in her memories and leaves the hypersensitive girl strangely unmoved. Cooper’s characters are brought vividly to life, but their presence and purpose in her fictional world are meandering and ill conceived.

Love Object is ultimately less than the sum of its parts, but at least some of the parts are beautifully, sometimes brilliantly, rendered.