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Summary: Surely the best work of fiction by a living author.
Review: Sula is troubling, powerful, poetic, intense, magical, gorgeous and devastating. Morrison explodes binaries, celebrates "sistergirl" bonds and comments interestingly on the love of mothers for their children and the hardships of African American communities. Sula should be on every high school book list- but usually is blaringly absent from curricula. However, Professors in university are well aware of this novel's force and range and univ. lit programs are likely to include this fantastic, jarring, intensely human work in their curriculum. Sula makes Beloved seem like little more than a simple ghost story. Morrison's craftsmanship here is jaw-droppingly brilliant. Don't read it once, read it several times...every reading will reveal more!!
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Summary: Poetic and Powerful!
Review: SULA was the first of Ms. Morrison's books I had the pleasure to read, and I was hooked from the first page. Her use of language and imagery are evocative of Virginia Woolf, but her style is all her own. She paints a haunting and beautiful picture with her words that readers will remember long after they close the final chapter. A must-read for any fan of great literature.
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Summary: Thoughts on Sula
Review: Being only around 180 pages it is worth a read, although I would have attained more reading enjoyment from $25 worth of comic books.
Rating: 
Summary: THE BEST BOOK I'VE EVER READ
Review: THE BOOK SULA IS A VERY GOOD BOOK. I WOULD ADVISE ANYONE TO READ THIS BOOK IF YOU HAVE TO READ IT FOR A BOOK REPORT OR IF YOU JUST LIKE TO READ. IT TELLS OF DIFFERENT THINGS THAT HAPPENED BACK IN THE DAY. IT TELLS OF TWO BEST FRIENDS WHO ARE VERY CLOSR UNTIL THEY GROW UP AND MOVE AWAY. IF YOU LOVE GOOD BLACK STORIES THEN YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK.
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Summary: Dark, Intense, Uncompromising Portrait of Hard Life
Review: The central themes that Toni Morrison tackles in this work are relevant today and wonderfully executed, although very dark and in rough territory. Friendship, death (of more than the physical kind), a hard life, and little regard for morality comes across in this novel. Her primary characters are women, featuring her as an important writer in any Women's Lit class worth its salt. She holds a mirror, making us, forcing us to look, to reinvaulate American Society, to learn from our past so we do not repeat it in our future. However, younger readers should not be allowed this, because the language is harsh and there is some descriptive sexual scenes. Morrison in detail develops the relationship between Sula and Nel, and show, in this short novel, how each move into different paths and how each must cope with the other's decisions. Sula becomes a seductress whilst Nel becomes a housewife. This woman who so loved Nel she cut off part of her finger to protect her later destroys Nel's family. Sula finds it difficult to stay within proper boundaries, apt to be irresponsible, whereas Nel counteracts her. Morrison also shows the product of the slave mentality: black men who did not feel responsible for their children. She keeps this consistently thruout her works. In the slave nightmarish world, black men did not have to provide for them, because that was the owner's job, and because the white man treated them as stock the black's family structure suffered very extensive damage which that is reflected even today in present society. The men would, when they wanted too, just disappear (Jude and BoyBoy here, Paul D in Beloved). The sins of the men are very great indeed. Shadrack, who you find in the opening section, plays an important part with his National Suicide Day (January 3). Traditionally, water symbolizes life, but in this novel it harkens death, and Shadrack is linked to the water, being a fisherman. One of the central elements Morrison allows us to perceive is the black community's desire to better themselves, and the white community setting them back. The whites give the blacks hills for farmland, saying it is prime farm land. In one central scene, Shadrack, leading people like a pied piper, go down, and try to cross over a bridge unfinished. On the symbolic level, the blacks, want of work, wanted to cross over to the white man's land that the white man had unfairly dominated. Shadrack, although none follow him for years (National Suicide Day deals with Shadrack's disgust of being alive in a society that has a good deal of racial injustices), which culminates, with everyone following him down to the bridge, and he, like the Pied Piper (although Shad has a better cause) watch as death comes upon them. Water is important here in another scene as well, as illustrated in another scene involving Nel and Sula when they are children. Over all, an ugly novel about harsh and bitter things. The situations are mean, but Morrison gives us a view into a dark part of life that many of us did not know about - I daresay we wish we didn't, either, because when she holds the mirror up to our face, we are quite repulsed what we see.
Rating:
Summary: Splendid
Review: A spellbinding, devastating, whole-hearted look at life from the eyes of some very special people. A triumphant novel that should not be overlooked.
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Summary: modern day Wuthering Heights
Review: This book was truly fantastic. I read it just after reading Wuthering Heights. Although the stories are quite different, many of the same themes ring true. Sula is very much a female Heathcliff. She seems ruthless and utterly self absorbed, but, like Heathcliff, unaware of how wrong and immoral her behavior is. I really could relate to the way Nel, Sula's best friend, is both attracted and afraid of Sula's wild manner. A really fabulous read!
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Summary: what are friends for?
Review: The complicated characters that Ms Morrison creates are really the every man and every woman in the black community. Her prose are lyrical and deep. What is usually referred to as "dark" passages in other books are merely conditions forced on the people she writes about. Two friends go through changes that most of us think we escape but really experience in one form or another. Granted, the big scene is thankfully one that is uncommon but it is representative of that big hole that African Americans fall in because they are easily indentifiable as African American or Black. It is nonstop reading.
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Summary: a tour-de-force
Review: This is my favorite Morrison novel and Morrison is one of my favorite contemporary authors, truly deserving of all the accolades that have come her way. Her writing reminds me in many respects of Gabriel Garcia Marquez', though I wouldn't include her in the "school" of magical realism. What they share, primarily, is an insight into the human condition and a gift for poetic, lyrical expresssion of that condition. Some of the responses to this book at Amazon come from, I must say, uninformed and unsophistacated prespectives. Sula is not meant to be a sympathetic character.In this respect she is similar to the main female character in As I Lay Dying, by Faulkner, a writer who also populates his novels with less than savory figures. I would even maintain that Morrison's perspective is very similar to Faulkner's in many respects. Both share a keen sense of irony and look at the world without blinders on. Both are very close to the truth. Morrison's canvas is used to paint a picture that is not pretty. Neither is life pretty, unless you inhabit some insulated,Panglossian pocket of the universe. Morrison is a writer of the first rank, and trust me, there are not many of her calibre writing today. I would suggest this as a great introduction to her oevre.
Rating: 
Summary: Sula-A Mistake to read
Review: Sula, by Toni Morrison is by far the worst book I have ever read in my whole life. It is boring and extremely tedious. It is also the most incoherent and lewd book I have read in a long time. Save yourself some pain and agony and choose another book. Do not make the same mistake I did, AVOID THIS BOOK AT ALL COSTS!
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