Beloved by Toni Morrison: Review

Welcome to my review of Beloved by Toni Morrison! Unfortunately, I have not read a lot of Black classics, so I’m trying to remedy that by reading some of the greats.

Title: Beloved
Author: Toni Morrison
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Vintage
Pub Date: 09/16/1987

Description

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.

Review

“There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.”

Beloved was my first introduction to Toni Morrison’s work, and I completely understand now. This book stretched my mind in a way it hadn’t been in a while, and I had so much to think about and hypothesize as the book delved into trauma and community so masterfully. The flashbacks to Sweet Home and the ending of the book were my favorite. I don’t know how I feel about Sethe, but I appreciated that the characters were so fleshed out that I could understand them even if I didn’t agree with their actions or judgements. Denver was probably the character that my opinion of changed the most, but that’s why I liked the ending so much.

This feels like a book that you would have to read a few times to pick up on everything because there’s so many elements occurring simultaneously that it can be hard to understand it the first time. The book is definitely smarter than me. I do want to read another Morrison book though because this was a really good experience.

Author

TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature.