Painting Mercy: 2 (Orla's Canvas)

In Painting Mercy the sequel to prize-winning Orlas Canvas Orla now twenty-four has been studying and painting in New York City. It is 1975. Saigon has fallen to the Communists and Vietnamese refugees have been invited to settle in New Orleans by Archbishop Hannan a former paratrooper and military chaplain in WW II. Orlas childhood friend and forever confidant Tad Charbonneau is practicing immigration law in New Orleans where he mitigates challenging adoption cases involving children many of them bi-racial recently airlifted from Saigon and in need of new families. On her way back home for Katie Cowles wedding and a summer painting in misspelled St. Suplice Orla reconnects with Tad and contemplates her future. While she anticipates marriage and family with her undisputed soul mate she discovers upsetting news about Tads sexuality and learns that her forty-three-year-old mother is pregnant. Adding to her troubling personal revelations Orla becomes involved in the devastating costs of war for former GI and Katies brother Denny Cowles and Mercy Cleveland a Vietnamese orphan who eventually becomes as essential to Orla as her art. Orla once again calls upon her art to make sense of loss and gain. Through her craft she reimagines how Love and Home might look finally charting a future for herself she had not previously considered possible.