Declare Books Supposing God Help the Child
| Original Title: | God Help the Child |
| ISBN: | 0307594173 (ISBN13: 9780307594174) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Toni Morrison
Hardcover | Pages: 178 pages Rating: 3.74 | 22187 Users | 3120 Reviews
Commentary In Pursuance Of Books God Help the Child
Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child—the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment—weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult.Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child is a searing tale about the way childhood trauma shapes and misshapes the life of the adult. At the center: a 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 until she told a lie that ruined the life of an innocent woman, a lie whose reverberations refuse to diminish ... Booker, the man Bride loves and loses, whose core of anger was born in the wake of the childhood murder of his beloved brother ... Rain, the mysterious white child, who finds in Bride the only person she can talk to about the abuse she's suffered at the hands of her prostitute mother ... and Sweetness, Bride's mother, who takes a lifetime to understand that "what you do to children matters. And they might never forget."
Present Out Of Books God Help the Child
| Title | : | God Help the Child |
| Author | : | Toni Morrison |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 178 pages |
| Published | : | April 21st 2015 by Knopf (first published December 2014) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Cultural. African American. Literary Fiction. Contemporary. Novels |
Rating Out Of Books God Help the Child
Ratings: 3.74 From 22187 Users | 3120 ReviewsCommentary Out Of Books God Help the Child
Warning: Strong language and adult situationsGod help the child sentenced to life as a character in a Toni Morisson novel. God help the child. Her fans, including my own troubled self (but not the untroubled one), know that within Morrison's work there lurks the F.U.S.T.H. The FUSTH invisibly powers the outward fling of consequence, or it magnetically calls actors back to its charged core. The Fucked-Up Shit That Happened. The Fucked-Up Shit that Happened finds itself inscribed upon herHow is Toni Morrison still this good?This short novel starts with a brief chapter by a mother whose daughter is born with exceptionally dark skin. The mother, Sweetness, says very little, but you can see that she thinks this is a curse her daughter must bear. That attitude is the beginning of a woman's journey and a story about child abuse of all kinds. Physical, sexual, emotional, it's all here in one way or another. None of it is described in detail, the story picks up when Sweetness's
Everybody bow down, Toni Morrison still reigns. In this short novel, we meet Bride. A young woman who, as a child, testified in a court case which led to the imprisonment of an alleged child abuser. Twenty years later, Bride tries to make peace with the woman whom she sent to prison. I'll stop there and allow you to read the rest of the novel.Morrison imbues this novel with her renowned mastery of prose which allows the reader to sweep through this novel in only a sitting or two. This novel is a
A powerful novel that asks more questions than it answers. I love how Morrison names startling and pernicious topics that influence our present society in God Help the Child, such as the privilege and glorification of whiteness as well as the horrors of child abuse and molestation. Despite its brevity, this book feels intense, as it contains so many deep emotions and fraught tensions between characters and their desires for love, peace, and acceptance. Yet, the book never feels overwrought,
The cycle of life, naivete, childhood burdens, and of course the all-knowing sigh of a battle-worn parent who finally gets to say, "Now that you're a parent, you'll see how hard it is." The (view spoiler)[magical realism (hide spoiler)] element was a nice surprise, and I'm glad it wasn't mentioned in any synopses.
Read this in one breath. Really lovely novel about how a young woman made a desperate choice to be loved by her mother, how that choice would shape her life, and how she was able to overcome a mistake to become her own woman. I am especially marveling at the novel's structure and how it all comes together at the end. I was both surprised and satisfied by the ending. This is just an excellent novel.
This novel is really not good...The reviews have been studiously polite but have been gesturing to the deficits in the book, which are considerable. I say this not to discredit Toni Morrison because I love her work. But the elements of this novel are explored with so much more nuance and terrible beauty elsewhere in her oeuvre: cruelty, sexual abuse, color consciousness, and the terrible vulnerability of children (The Bluest Eye) and the inhuman force of fire, the irresistible allure of a strong
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