Toni MorrisonReviews

This was my first read by Toni Morrison. I was drawn to it because it is on the endangered book list in my state. I LOVED this book. This woman can write. One of the saddest, most eye opening, and moving books I have ever read. I look forward to diving into more works by her.

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

I'm not giving this book any stars because, to be honest, I don't really understand what I just read! There were moments of beauty in this book -- pearls of exquisite writing -- but I just could not follow the story line let alone make sense of the greater meaning. I'll be discussing this with some friends who I hope can enlighten me!

I don't even know where to begin. Brutal...yet beautiful. I'll probably never forget this one.

Stunning, thought-provoking book, more of a short story at forty pages, featuring two young girls who befriend each other in a shelter. One is black and one is white and which is which is inconclusive.

It is a beautifully written book about the return of a young man from the Korean "Conflict" to his Georgia home, from the American Army to the segregation of the USA, a perfect Memorial Day read. His Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is in full flower and his coping mechanisms at low ebb as he crosses the country from discharge in Seattle to his Georgia town. I found something wanting in the tale, perhaps character development? I'm not sure. The plot was credible although the evil doctor seemed tacked on at the end and his work shrouded in haziness and the disloyalty of Sarah continuing to work for him as his victims passed through troubled me.

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.

Read this one the old fashioned way: checked the book out from the public library.
Known for its insights into the hearts of people feeling rejected, dejected, and ornery as a result, this is a sure cure if you fear you’re feeling overly ebullient.

Well, there's reason why it's considered a classic.

A little masterpiece of a novel, which for many reasons, none of which are a reflection on the work, I didn't enjoy reading, even though I could see Morrison's genius, insight and brilliance all through it. I even marked a couple passages where the prose or an observation made a particular impact on me. Overall, however, I was just not moved by the lives of Sula, Nel, their families and acquaintances. I don't feel that Morrison wanted to elicit sympathy for them, and that may be where she lost me.½

READERS SIDENOTE: I feel at times compelled to read a book because of its hype, or it won an award, or it has a snazzy cover; in this case, The Bluest Eye was not only a National Bestseller, it was a winner of The Nobel Prize in Literature - that's a big deal. Unfortunately, this, like many that have caught my eye because of extraneous reasons rather than my gut based on "the back flap," fell flat. This flatness was not because of poor writing or bad subject matter; it was because of the same reason that prompted me to pick it up: the hype, and my, in turn, expectation.

The Bluest Eye is a story of true color; Pecola Breedlove's ebony skin and her desire for blue eyes - to make her beautiful. In the afterward, Ms. Morrison pens that she doesn't want the reader to pity Pecola, but it's hard not to. As a mother, as a person who always found fault in her appearance, I read the book with a mixture of sadness, empathy, pity, and guilt (my eyes are not blue, but my skin is white).

The book was not to derive my guilt but to enlighten me, I'm sure, which it did - I felt deeply for Pecola's dream to be what she could never; in her case, a girl with blue eyes. Ms. Morrison does an exceptional job at causing the reader to see their innocuous fortune through the eyes of those who are told they are not as blessed.

I got lost a couple of times as the book wandered down a path to call out an example or point and then felt jolted back when the scene would shift, and I again understood where I was and with whom I was interacting as the reader. I guess this inability to follow would be my issue, as who am I to discredit or downplay the scholars voting on the highest acclaim in literature.

Would I recommend the Bluest Eye? Yes. I think we all need to be stretched, academically and socially.

This is not the edition I read. This is the last I will read of Toni Morrison for a while. I still am not in to magic realism and surrealism. It is important for me to read that many people of color are always aware that they are not respected in this society. They know their history and that they were not considered whole members of society. This can lead to great self-hate, hatred of other people of color, and hatred of whites, especially the elites. This is still a relevant book, unfortunately.½

My first Morrison re-read mainly because there was a read event with Literacy Partners with some wonderful people/authors on Youtube, while reading along with a copy in my hands. I can't believe the first time I read this was twenty years ago. Admittedly, it was the Morrison I thought was mostly Just Fine, so I wanted to see if I am a better reader now. I would hope. Originally, the only thing I remembered was being annoyed that a little girl wanted blue eyes, so entirely have transformed the book over time, due to my faulty memory, as the yearning for blue eyes being the entire plot. Wow, wrong. Morrison was already a genius with her first book, even if she herself thought there were problems in the execution here. I notice a bit of that, but also admire what Morrison was trying to say here, the purpose of the book. Shocking is how much I have forgotten in the book-- however, I would guess my brain might have forgotten a lot of this intentionally, as much of it is so miserable. I'm happy to have re-read it, only for better appreciation.½

The message of this book is so important, but the presentation was scattered and difficult for me to understand. I did understand that the characters were always aware of their race and their place in society, whether that society be Black or white. And even though this book was set in 1941, bigotry is still very much present. With the difficulties of the book, I did feel for many of the characters, even those who behaved in ways that upset me. This is at least my 2nd time reading it, and it is worth reading again.

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.

This is an amazing, important work of literature and contribution to humanity. Toni Morrison's writing is astoundingly good, making it hard to put the book down. The subject matter, at times, can be very heavy and difficult to digest, causing much pondering and reflection after reading. This book is not to be approached lightly or trivialized.

Morrison presents this powerful look at how literature has helped and hindered our understanding of what it means to be and be seen as "white" or "not white" in America.

The book is pocket size and only a bit more than 100 pages, so we don't read everything discussed in her six lectures. Still, much is covered and I'm left with the feeling that nothing important is left out. She explains why and how she has written her important novels, gives examples from her life, discusses history and politics.

It's about slavery, immigration, globalization, the psychology and social meanings of blackness, foreignness, forced and voluntary movement from place to place in the past and especially now. A book every American should read.

Like most people who've earned a degree in literature in the United States since 1990, I've read Toni Morrison's "Beloved" about three times. I really like parts of that one -- mostly the bit where the characters retell their past experiences or when the author goes head-to-head with William Faulkner. Much of the rest of that book seems a bit stagy to me, though, a bit stiff.

So Sula surprised me a little. It's a much looser affair than "Beloved", and while I can't call it a happy book, necessarily, it's got more room for eccentricity and its own sort of humor. Its lens is also a bit wider than that other novel's, too. It takes place over about seventy years -- one human lifespan -- and Morrison takes as her subject the entire black community living in the town of Medallion, Ohio, not just Nell and Sula, the two women at the novel's center. So we hear about war veterans that didn't come back quite right and pool halls and candy stores and small-town gossip even while Morrison works out some of the themes that she'd express more fully in "Beloved." We hear a lot about the characters' houses and their bodies and the all-consuming sense of emptiness some of them contend with. I don't know if I can say that "Sula" is as successful or as ambitious as "Beloved" is: the latter is due for a re-read. But for a novel that clocks at just under two hundred pages, it feels marvelously rich and complete, and features many examples of real high-quality prose, the stuff that separates the pretenders from the contenders, when all is done. This is an astonishingly polished and impressive performance, especially considering it was just Morrison's second novel. Recommended, especially if you couldn't understand why "Beloved" got such great reviews.

This is a great novel that portrays the trauma bestowed on black Americans before, during, and after the Civil War through the telling of a "haint" story of a family haunted by their dead baby. Multigenerational trauma is shown brilliantly, and Morrison does not pull any punches. This is a great book.

A Mercy flings itself right at you from the opening page with dark promises and visions:

My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark - weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more - but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. I explain. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain.

The novel will make clearer this poetic opaqueness as it goes on, but it's a disorienting and heady opening.

The person speaking those lines is Florens, a teenage slave in 17th century Virginia. What brought her to this point is founded in the experience of a trauma she does not comprehend the full story of, a trauma following from a series of previous traumas stretching from Angola to Maryland to Virginia. Trying to save her from the predations of their slavemasters, her mother thrust the child into the path of a trader to whom their owners owed a debt. A man whom Florens' mother believes sees Florens as a human child, not prey. "There is no protection, only difference," her mother states late on. In this world, such counts as a mercy.

Florens is traumatized by what she sees as this rejection by her mother. When she reaches adolescence, she seeks to fill her deep longing for attachment through the person of a visiting blacksmith, a free black man in the colony. This dependence of women on men is of a piece with all classes of society portrayed in the novel, from "loose women" to the "upright" Anabaptist congregation. "Although they had nothing in common with the views of each other," Morrison writes, "they had everything in common with one thing: the promise and threat of men. Here, they agreed, was where security and risk lay. And both had come to terms."

It makes all the sense in the world, then, that Florens would bet her entire life and identity on an attachment to the blacksmith. "Never never without you. Here I am not the one to throw out." But Florens clashes with a young child the blacksmith is raising, two children extraordinarily jealous of each other's presence here, physically hurts him, and the blacksmith tells her to leave. More than that, he accuses her of becoming a slave in choice, an empty mind controlled by an uncultivated wildness. "Own yourself, woman, and leave us be," he tells her. Given Florens' trauma and youth, this seems unreasonably harsh; Florens at any rate has her vitally held identity as the blacksmith's woman smashed, has a complete mental break, her her grasping of a hammer explains the ominous reference to blood in the novel's open.

The novel closes with Florens' mother stating what she wished to have been able to impart to her daughter: "to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing." The first might be a reference to motherhood, the difficult responsibility of doing your best for your child in circumstances horrific or otherwise, when your children may or may not understand your choices. The second seems a reference to slavery, one of the undoubted evils in the novel. The third seems a warning not to seek deliverance by handing your agency and identity to another, may you be a love starved youth or a respectable church-going member of the community.

A powerful novel with rich language, I'll also take the following sentence as a treasure from the book, not because of any centrality to the plot, but because the poetry of it makes me stop in wonder.

Walking in the warm night air, he went as far as possible, until the alehouse lights were gem stones fighting darkness and the voices of carousing men were lost to the silk-rustle of surf.

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This book is extraordinary in its success at evoking a time and place. The premise is simple: a poor young black girl grows up with a simple wish: to have blue eyes so she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children. The book’s enormous power is due, I think, largely to Morrison’s mastery of the English language. So much so that I have trouble imagining how this work could possibly be translated. It seems to me to be so inextricably intertwined with a place and time and with a vernacular use of English that it seems untranslatable. (I think, as an aside, that that is a great topic for another thread: how much works can be so much a part of the place and language and time as to be inaccessible to readers who read the work in a different place and a different time and a different language. Examples that pop to mind: Bely’s Petersburg or Goethe’s Faust, though of course the list is endless.) This is Morrison’s first book and it impressed me enormously. In the words of a goodread’s reviewer, it is a “haunting, poignant and unforgettable elegy to the horrors that American slavery spawned.” Although that reviewer was describing Morrison’s Beloved (not this book), I think the same observation holds true. This is a remarkable work: remarkable for its writing and for its clear-eyed, heartbreaking nostalgia for certain aspects of a world that is both gone and irretrievably still with us.

I finished this book 2 days ago and have been thinking about what to write about it, and I'm coming up empty. I don't think I fully "got" it, and I didn't find it nearly as compelling as almost every other work of Morrison's I've read. It started very slowly for me, and even once it became a bit more engaging, I just couldn't find that I cared about any of the people or relationships depicted in it.

Morrison's usual themes of male-female, female-female, black-white, black-black relationships in all their complexity were present, as was her incredible prose. The characters, though, remained inscrutable to me, and some of her narrative choices prevented me from fully sinking into the story.

All that said, I'm not sorry I read it, as there is always something worthwhile in reading Morrison. I would rate this at the lower end of the spectrum of her novels (along with God Help the Child).

3.5 stars½

I am not going to lie, I have been scared to read this book for a good long time. It exists enough in the culture that I was roughly familiar with what the central wound was at the heart of this book, and I was not ready to bear witness to that, nor to hold it in my own heart. But I have been very slowly making my way through Morrison's work and it was time.

Of course it was incredible. The kind of incredible that had me ready to fight every low rating review on goodreads. Of course no book is for everyone, so I had to let it go. Yes, this book is heartbreaking as advertised, but it is also important, magical, enthralling, painful, so incredibly human, and threaded through with hope. Still processing this one.