I've read African-American lit before, obviously...Native Son, The Color Purple, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Bluest Eye, 12 Years A Slave. But with the possible exception of the last one on that list, none really drove home the harrowing legacy of slavery quite as viscerally as this one.

Beloved tells the story of Sethe, an escaped slave who lives in Ohio with her teenage daughter, Denver, in isolation in a house haunted by a baby ghost. When Paul D, a former slave who was on the same plantation as Sethe, arrives on her doorstep, everything begins to change. Paul D banishes the baby ghost, but just as things start to settle into something resembling peaceful, a strange young woman named Beloved appears outside Sethe's house and insinuates herself into the family to disastrous effect.

The story switches back and forth in time, from Sethe's young womanhood on the plantation to where the story began, even as the present storyline progresses. Horrors only lightly hinted at in the beginning develop fully as Beloved begins to assert her control, showing how Sethe and Denver ended up alone together in that haunted house to begin with. Beloved herself becomes more than just a mysteriously powerful young woman, breaking the people around her down from the inside, she becomes symbolic of the monstrous nature of slavery itself. Sethe, Paul D, and Denver might be "free", but the pernicious legacy of slavery is inescapable.

I found myself wondering as I was reading the book if Toni Morrison had read any Eastern European Jewish folklore, for Beloved reminded me of nothing so much as a dybbuk. True to a kind of folklore style, the novel relies heavily on magical realism, which isn't usually my favorite style of writing (I love fantasy novels, but I like them separately from my regular fiction), but works very effectively here. It allows Beloved to have many psychological lenses through which she can be interpreted without letting the story be set comfortably away from actual experience. Beloved, and Beloved, demands that we confront the real, continuing injustice of slavery. It doesn't let us hide behind long ago and far away. ( )

While this was not my favorite read by Morrison I did enjoy it. Toni Morrison is a beautiful writer. Worth the read. ( )

This book is spectral. ( )

I'd really like to write a thoughtful and intelligent review. I just can't. Toni Morrison's prose makes anything I type read like angry ducks, quacking. So I'm just going to write, If you are considering this book, be prepared to be shattered by its beauty and horror. Beloved is brilliant, gut-wrenching, hard work for a reader and it will enrich your mind and heart. ( )

I finally read Toni Morrison's Pulitzer prize-winning novel, Beloved. I can't believe I never read this incredible novel. It was my October Banned Book read gifted to me by my daughter-in-law, and it is a novel that everyone should read. Taking place shortly after the Civil War, former slave Sethe and her daughter Denver live in Ohio and are haunted by spirit of Sethe's dead baby Beloved. No one in town will associate with them for reasons that become apparent. Another former slave Paul shows up to stay with Sethe and Denver, and soon a young woman appears who shakes up things in the household. Sethe is traumatized by her life as a slave, and Morrison shows the reader the horrors and dangers of treating people as less than human. It is brutal and eye-opening, and heartbreaking. This book should not be banned, it should be required reading. ( )