I wouldn’t call this the best novel Toni Morrison has ever written, but given how high she has set the bar, God Help The Child is still a powerful read that I would highly recommend. It is about the abuse of children, and about damaged adults. It is full of Morrison’s characteristically spare but lyrical prose and disconcerting magical realism. It is full of pain and rage, but also redemption and resolution. Her main character is a little girl named Mary Lou, born with “blue-black” skin […]
The Haunting and the Haunted
Sethe, a former slave, is raising her last child left in the lonely, two story house at 124. Well, they aren’t completely alone. There is the spiteful spirit that bedevils the house, scaring away Sethe’s two sons and turning her mother-in-law infirm. The arrival of Paul D, another former slave that worked on the same farm as Seth, brings a short period of relief from the haunting. Until a few days later, when a young woman shows up on their porch, with no memory, who […]
You Should Be So Lucky to Have a Woman as a Friend
Published in 1973, Toni Morrison’s second novel Sula is a short but incredibly rich story about friendship and community, and about the ways that fear and hatred can bring people together and tear them apart. Morrison’s characters can be enticing and alluring, powerful and defiant in the face of poverty, prejudice, disappointment, and death. The title character Sula is a rebel amongst her community in Medallion, Ohio. As a black woman in the 1920s and ’30s, she refused to be confined by the limits society […]