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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A New York Times Notable Book * This fiery and provocative novel from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult.
At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally, Bride's mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that "what you do to children matters. And they might never forget."
"Powerful.... A tale that is as forceful as it is affecting, as fierce as it is resonant." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Author Notes
Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio on February 18, 1931. She received a B.A. in English from Howard University in 1953 and a master's degree in English from Cornell University in 1955 with her thesis on the theme of suicide in modern literature. She taught at several universities including Texas Southern University, Howard University, and Princeton University.
Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. Her other works include Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Paradise, Love, A Mercy, Home, and God Help the Child. She has won several awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon in 1977, the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1988, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, the Edward MacDowell Medal for her outstanding contribution to American culture in 2016, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. She also co-wrote children's books with her son, Slade Morrison, including The Big Box, The Book of Mean People, and Peeny Butter Fudge.
Toni Morrison passed away on August 5, 2019 at the age of 88, after a short illness.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Morrison's latest novel finds adults struggling to overcome the emotional scars of childhood. The story begins with the birth of Lula Ann Bridewell, a deep blue-black-skinned baby whose light-skinned mother cannot stand to touch her. Grown-up Lula Ann transforms herself into Bride, a glamorous fashion executive who still yearns for love and acceptance in her personal life. Amid preparations for the launch of her signature cosmetics line, Bride offers a gift bag of cash and cosmetics to parolee Sofia Huxley, the kindergarten teacher Bride accused of sexual abuse 15 years before. Sofia's angry rejection of Bride's present, coinciding with the departure of Bride's lover, inspires such self-doubt that Bride fears regressing into Lula Ann. Morrison reads with tremendous insight and empathy for the characters, vividly bringing them to life. Every emotional nuance-yearning, bewilderment, anger, love, self-empowerment-resonates in her voice, making this a powerful audio experience that elevates Morrison's already remarkable and memorable prose. A Knopf hardcover. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Brutality, racism and lies are relieved by moments of connection in Morrison's latest.A little girl is born with skin so black her mother will not touch her. Desperate for approval, to just once have her mother take her hand, she tells a lie that puts an innocent schoolteacher in jail for decades. Later, the ebony-skinned girl will change her name to Bride, wear only white, become a cosmetics entrepreneur, drive a Jaguar. Her lover, a man named Booker, also bears a deep scar on his soulhis older brother was abducted, tortured and murdered by a pedophilic serial killer. This is a skinny, fast-moving novel filled with tragic incidents, most sketched in a few haunting sentences: "The last time Booker saw Adam he was skateboarding down the sidewalk in twilight, his yellow T-shirt fluorescent under the Northern Ash trees." When Bride's falsely accused teacher is released from prison, there's a new round of trouble. Booker leaves, Bride goes after himand ends up in the woods, recovering from a car accident with hippie survivalists who have adopted a young girl abused by her prostitute mother. Meanwhile, Bride is anxiously watching her own body metamorphose into that of a childher pubic hair has vanished, her chest has flattened, her earlobes are smooth. As in the darkest fairy tales, there will be fire and death. There will also be lobster salad, Smartwater and Louis Vuitton; the mythic aspects of this novel are balanced by moments like the one in which Bride decides that the song that most represents her relationship with Booker is "I Wanna Dance with Somebody." A chilling oracle and a lively storyteller, Nobel winner Morrison continues the work she began 45 years ago with The Bluest Eye. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This novel is brief for Morrison brief for most any major novelist. There is a lot of foundational information for readers to quickly learn in the opening pages. Brevity for Morrison doesn't mean cutting out lots of plot development and character presentation. It means that the usual amount of that kind of elaboration is condensed in fewer pages than what would be expected. So there is no wading into the story and gathering at a measured pace all the important clues about people and events that the reader ordinarily has time to absorb and process. The theme can be gleaned from the title. This is a novel about how psychological damage in childhood influences the way an adult leads his or her life. Four voices, four characters the primary one being Bride, born so dark-skinned that her light-skinned mother was loathe to even touch her give solo articulation to their hurts when young and the consequent dented versions of their adult selves. Now, the strength of the novel and it does indeed gain compelling strength is that it becomes a swirl of deep emotions, sucking the reader in, which is good, because the point of the novel is to empathize as deeply as possible with what these characters experience. High-Demand Backstory: A new Morrison novel? Stock up. Enough said.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
EMPIRE OF DECEPTION: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation, by Dean Jobb. (Algonquin, $16.95.) In 1920s Chicago, Leo Koretz defrauded hundreds of people (including members of his own family) and lured them to invest millions of dollars in bogus overseas projects. Jobb's rollicking history of the con man doubles as a sobering reminder that, as our reviewer, Paula Uruburu, said, "those who think everything is theirs for the taking are destined to be taken." GOD HELP THE CHILD, by Toni Morrison. (Vintage, $14.95.) Even as a baby, Bride, the character at the heart of this story, was spurned by her parents because of her dark skin, and her cold upbringing reverberates throughout her adult life. The novel, which our reviewer, Kara Walker, called "a brisk modern-day fairy tale with shades of the Brothers Grimm," delivers a blunt moral: "What you do to children matters." THERE WAS AND THERE WAS NOT: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond, by Meline Toumani. (Picador/Metropolitan/Holt, $18.) Growing up in an Armenian community in New Jersey, Toumani was steeped in fierce anti-Turkish rhetoric revolving around the genocide that began in 1915. As an adult, she moved to Istanbul to better understand the Turkish view. Her memoir recounts her years living amid an alternate understanding of history. A LITTLE LIFE, by Hanya Yanagihara. (Anchor, $17.) This expansive novel is an exploration of heartbreak and the limits of human resilience. Yanagihara's central character, Jude, emerges from a brutal childhood and builds an ostensibly successful life - he graduates with a law degree from Harvard, finds meaningful work as a litigator and is the heart of a close-knit group of friends - yet struggles to reconcile his past traumas. OUR LIVES, OUR FORTUNES AND OUR SACRED HONOR: The Forging of American Independence, 1774-1776, by Richard R. Beeman. (Basic Books, $18.99.) American independence from Britain may seem to have been an inevitable outcome, but Beeman offers a window into a time when that future was not so certain. His account follows the 22 months when delegates from the colonies, often with no more in common with one another than their status as British subjects, imagined a cohesive nation and identity. OUTLAWS, by Javier Cercas. Translated by Anne McLean. (Bloomsbury, $18.) In the late 1970s, when teenage gangs roamed post-Franco Spain, this novel's narrator, Ignacio Cañas, joined a group headed by a notorious outlaw, Zarco, but left after a failed robbery. Years later, Cañas is a successful lawyer and Zarco is in jail, but the men's lives intersect again. STALIN. VOLUME I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, by Stephen Kotkin. (Penguin, $25.) This book, the first of a projected three-volume study, recounts Stalin's childhood in Georgia and subsequent rise to power. Kotkin's account also delivers an impressive history of late imperial Russia.
Library Journal Review
In her 11th novel, Morrison (Beloved) relates a story-a fable, really-about childhood abuse, family, history, and time. Lula Ann Bridewell, born with blue-black skin, was rejected by her light-skinned mother, Sweetness. As an adult, Lula Ann (who renames herself Bride) is successful and loved by her boyfriend Booker. All this changes, however, when Bride decides to make amends for a terrible lie she told as a child. Morrison's storytelling is always powerful, but in this novel that power is muted. There are moments of lyric wonder, beautifully conveyed by the author's own narration, but too often the descriptions of characters (except for Bride and Sweetness) seem short, even truncated, and there are times when the reader wishes that the touches of magic realism that appear would become more integral to the overall plot. VERDICT Even with these flaws, the storytelling accumulates a strength and drive that are distinctive to Morrison, making this, in the end, a worthwhile listen. ["There are some moves here that may seem obvious, but the pieces all fit together seamlessly in a story about beating back the past, confronting the present, and understanding one's worth": LJ 3/15/15 starred review of the Knopf hc.]-Wendy -Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.