Rating: 
Summary: Excellent exploration of love, lovemaking and relationships
Review: Alice Walker has again taken us on a journey to examine how our actions can have affect on those we love. If you are up to the challenge to read and comprehend, let Alice take you through a whirlwind of erotic passion and heart mending reconciliation. Alice also very insightfully writes from a MAN's point of view, as the father/angel observes the outcomes of his daughters' lives. Any male reader (as I am), secure with himself and willing to think and learn will enjoy this novel. A wonderful read for a discussion group! Easily my favorite Alice Walker book to date.
Rating: 
Summary: Not for everyone!
Review: Alice Walker is one of those writers whose work has the power to reach out and touch you when you need it most. This and I believe many of her other works are meant to be read at certain critical points in a specific persons life. Points when it is necessary to come to terms with a particular complex of issues. I thought it was telling when one reviewer said that the pre-occupation by some of the characters in this book with their personal traumas was unrealistic. Trauma is by its very nature pre-occupying. And what becomes lodged in an individual persons psyche as a result of the trauma they have experienced is typically unique to that individual (no one can judge the magnitude of pain in anothers heart). As a person who has been hurt reading the words of Alice Walker not only lets me know that another is serving as a witness to my pain it also shows me that there is joy waiting behind a door that I hadn't even realized existed. And it is in those moments that I feel truly blessed my her writing. Perhaps this and her other works are not perfect, in truth they are not. But in that moment when she has captured the pain in ones heart and soul, given it voice and a means to move forward who cares if it isn't the perfect novel? I guess those who haven't felt the coldness of a heart alone and bereft. For my part I say thank you Alice and keep writing, at least for me!
Rating:
Summary: Enchanting
Review: As an Alice Walker fan, I was very pleased with this new novel. Her use of the English language is so poetic, it flows out of the book, and into your soul. I loved how she used her characters to show how events of the past can have an effect on the future. I would have given this book five stars, but I changed my rating for one reason...it was sometimes difficult to follow who was narrating the story from time to time. Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone who has never read a novel by Alice Walker.
Rating:
Summary: Enchanting
Review: As an Alice Walker fan, I was very pleased with this new novel. Her use of the English language is so poetic, it flows out of the book, and into your soul. I loved how she used her characters to show how events of the past can have an effect on the future. I would have given this book five stars, but I changed my rating for one reason...it was sometimes difficult to follow who was narrating the story from time to time. Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone who has never read a novel by Alice Walker.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Captivating!
Review: By The Light of My Father's Smile explores the past, present, and future connection of the female characters in the novel to their father. Walker uses a multi-voiced approach in revealing the complexities of relationships both parental and romantic. The characters' speak from both life and deaths experiences revealing to the reader that issues not resolved in life must certainly be reconciled in death. Walker delivers insight and wisdom through the use of folklore, and the spiritual philosophy of an ancient Mexican/African tribe. She is able to demonstrate with clarity how male oppression of women, specifically a father's oppression of his daughter, effects a woman emotionally, sexually, and spiritually. A definite must read for the masses.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Captivating!
Review: By The Light of My Father's Smile explores the past, present, and future connection of the female characters in the novel to their father. Walker uses a multi-voiced approach in revealing the complexities of relationships both parental and romantic. The characters' speak from both life and deaths experiences revealing to the reader that issues not resolved in life must certainly be reconciled in death. Walker delivers insight and wisdom through the use of folklore, and the spiritual philosophy of an ancient Mexican/African tribe. She is able to demonstrate with clarity how male oppression of women, specifically a father's oppression of his daughter, effects a woman emotionally, sexually, and spiritually. A definite must read for the masses.
Rating: 
Summary: Alice Walker but not the Best Alice Walker
Review: By the Light of My Father's Smile is qintessential Alice Walker; that is, the book examines what is wrong with a particular world, offers a solution for repairing that world and making that world more inhabitable for everyone in it. The book illustrates a shift in Walker's artistry. Although,Walker continues to examine intergenerational relationships, she centers this narrative in the spiritual rather than the earthly. What her work illustrates and what Walker herself advocates is that we are too much in the world and not with the world. We are immune to the messages that the moon, the sun, the stars, the earth and the greater spirit send us. Walker's novel offers a look at the world from the perspective of not being in it at all and discovering what we failed to look at and enjoy. It is a pleasant read but the characters are underdeveloped.
Rating:
Summary: Magical and Spiritual
Review: By the Light of My Father's Smile is yet another beautifully-wrought novel by Alice Walker. In this book, she deals with the after-life, forgiveness, and women's relationships with their fathers and men in general. The characters are not realistic, but magical and full of insights and spiritual wisdom. There are a slew of graphic sex scenes, none frivolous, which show the characters appreciative of and honoring their sexualities. A must-read for spiritual readers.
Rating:
Summary: Magical and Spiritual
Review: By the Light of My Father's Smile is yet another beautifully-wrought novel by Alice Walker. In this book, she deals with the after-life, forgiveness, and women's relationships with their fathers and men in general. The characters are not realistic, but magical and full of insights and spiritual wisdom. There are a slew of graphic sex scenes, none frivolous, which show the characters appreciative of and honoring their sexualities. A must-read for spiritual readers.
Rating:
Summary: New reader of Alice Walker
Review: Having only read "The Color Purple," I really felt like this was the first thing I'd read by Alice Walker. It took me a while to adjust to her indirect ways of indicating who is narrating, but eventually, I got the "sense" of it, and the story began to flow from there. This book is a great read not just for the story, which is interesting, but really for the deeper issues that the characters confront in a variety of ways.
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