Last week, I was taking a road trip up to Milwaukee, and I also had some indexing and sorting of teaching documents to complete. So last week’s library trip entailed some audiobook acquisitions. I’m trying to get back into that routine, since my commute will be starting in less than two weeks. I’ve been wanting to read Toni Morrison’s newest novels for a while, so A Mercy seemed like a good place to start. Plus, Morrison herself reads the audiobook. I was sold. A Mercy […]
Toni Morrison is kind of amazing
I was first introduced to Toni Morrison through Beloved (1987) in my high school English class. I remember Beloved being powerful and disturbing, but I’m guessing I would get more out of it now. Toni Morrison is an impressive woman, though, so when I saw she had a new book out: God Help the Child (2015), I immediately got on the library’s waitlist. I should just accept, before I get started, that my review is not going to do justice to this novel. It is complex and disturbing and probably […]
On Child Abuse and Redemption
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 […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 4
- 5
- 6