Book Summary and Reviews of Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

Tar Baby

by Toni Morrison

  • Published:
  • Mar 1981, 320 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner.

Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Deeply perceptive... . Return[s] risk and mischief to the contemporary American novel." —The New York Times Book Review

"Arresting images, fierce intelligence, poetic language ... One becomes entranced by Toni Morrison's story." —The Washington Post

"Wrenchingly good. A terrific book." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

This information about Tar Baby was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

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