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Beloved is Morrison's undisputed masterpiece. It elegantly captures hers trademark touches: elegant prose, fantastical occurrences, striking characters, and racial tension.
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.
1
I24 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old--as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once--the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, ...
What audience would you recommend The Bluest Eye to? Is there another book or author you feel has a similar theme or style?
I am probably in the minority, but I'm sorry I would not recommend this to my friends or book club. It addresses tough topics, but the tragedies and depravity were overdone, for my taste. It lacks even a thread of hope. This book may be best read and discussed in a college literature class. I wil...
-Sylvia_L
Were you familiar with The Bluest Eye before your recent reading of it? If you’d read it before, how has your interpretation or opinion of the novel changed since you first encountered it?
I had never heard of the book previous to seeing it being featured on BookBrowse. I have been thinking about reading Beloved which I am hoping will be a positive experience for me .
-Laurie_L
Overall, what did you think of The Bluest Eye? (no spoilers, please!)
This was one of the most powerful books I've ever read. If I had to rate it, I'd give it the highest rating possible. First, the writing itself was amazing—I found myself stopping to re-read and underline passage after passage. And Pecola's story was heartbreaking but believable. The pressure to ...
-Judith_G
In her forward, the author states that she was concerned readers would be led “into the comfort of pitying her rather than into an interrogation of themselves.” She feels she failed. Do you agree? What emotions did you feel on finishing the novel?
I sure wish I'd had the opportunity to discuss this in-depth in a classroom setting when I was younger. We read Baldwin in high school, but very few female authors. I think so many of us would have benefitted from knowing about this book way back then! And it's still benefitting us now! I know Mo...
-kim.kovacs
If you liked Beloved, try these:
by Jesmyn Ward
Published 2024
From Jesmyn Ward—the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow—comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.
by Robert Jones Jr.
Published 2022
A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence.
Awake in the Floating City
by Susanna Kwan
A debut novel about an artist and a 130-year-old woman bound by love and memory in a future, flooded San Francisco.
Serial Killer Games
by Kate Posey
A morbidly funny and emotionally resonant novel about the ways life—and love—can sneak up on us (no matter how much pepper spray we carry).
The Original Daughter
by Jemimah Wei
A dazzling debut by Jemimah Wei about ambition, sisterhood, and family bonds in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.
Ginseng Roots
by Craig Thompson
A new graphic memoir from the author of Blankets and Habibi about class, childhood labor, and Wisconsin’s ginseng industry.
If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas...
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