Tar Baby

Rating:
Summary: Lickety-split boring
Review: Good English skills, worth one star, rambling on in endless and trifle details lead to no conclusions in a mesh of decadent white masters full of caprice and down-to-earth-like-in-roots black servants. The one character that came through believable, is the queen of the soldier ants. Lack of phantasies and an absent talent of spellbinding make it utterly boring to the end, lickety-lickety-lickety split. gerborguta

Rating:
Summary: EHHH
Review: hoothoot420.
I found this book slow untill the middle and end. it wasnt as good as SULA, but it was laright. It is a story about love, abuse, and rascism. the White couple Margarete and Valerian have a son that later on in the novel you find that she abused the boy terribly, she burnt him, stuck him in the behind with pins and cut him. it is a good book, and i spose if someone asked i would recommend it

Rating:
Summary: Poetry in Novel form
Review: Tar Baby is the story of a young, successful, black model, who lives between the world of successful white people and her own black heritage. She continually struggles with the indebtedness that she feels towards her white benefactor and his wife. Jade's relationship with her benefactor is further complicated by the fact that her aunt and uncle, by whom she was raised, work as domestic help in the home of her benefactor Valerian Street.
The dynamics of the relationships between the members of the household keep you wondering from one moment to the next what will occur.
Margaret and Jade had a good relationship with their Aunt Ondine, but as the relationship between Margaret and Valerian continues, their relationship begins to decline. Sydney, Ondine's husband and his employer, Mr. Street get along very well. Sydney is very grateful for all the advantages that he has been given by Valerian.
Margaret who has befriended Jade, is less than emotionally stable. On several occasions Margaret has had episodes where she cannot remember how to do the most simple of tasks. She is also obsessed with an upcoming Christmas visit from her estranged son.
When a young black man is found hiding in the closet of Margaret Street, the whole mansion is thrown into chaos. The man is ragged and unclean. Margaret enters the dining room screaming about an intruder in her closet. Valerian, who sometimes tends to give little credence to his wife, ignores her. Sydney responds to the situation and goes to Margaret's aid. He brings the intruder to the dining room at gun point, where he is invited to join the dinner gathering by Valerian. This is Valerian's way of getting back at Margaret for her obsession with their estranged son.
The entire situation explodes and things are said by all members of the household and it is disclosed by Ondine that Margaret had physically abused her son when he was a child and that is the reason for her obsession with him, as well as her unstable emotional state.
To make matters even worse, Jade is attracted to this dangerous stranger and they run off together. She sees in him the side of her black heritage that she is out of touch with because of her success.
Throughout the entire book, you are treated to poetic, symbolic and descriptive writing by, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Toni Morrison. She explores the relationship of a black man true to his black heritage and a young woman who is molded by the white culture that has made her who she is.
The story explores relationships between blacks and whites, as well as the relationships between black people who have been given very different opportunities in life. It also examines how successful black people treat those less fortunate of their race.

Rating:
Summary: My First
Review: This was the first book I read by Toni Morrison . I beleive I was 10 years old and it was exactly what I neede to hear. As a dark-skinned Black girl, I had images about me thrust upon me, but to read someone articulate all this subterfuge about me regarding color, colorism within the Black community was amazing. I no longer felt like I was the only one. that was along tme ago, but upon re-reading 'Tar Baby' last Summer, I wa still amazed how powerful this book is.

Rating:
Summary: Hauntingly, Disturbingly Beautiful.
Review: "No, a star star. In the sky. Keep your eyes closed, think about what it feels like to be one." He moved over to her and kissed her shoulder. "Imagine yourself in that dark, all alone in the sky at night. Nobody is around you. You are by yourself, just shining there. You know how a star is supposed to twinkle? We say twinkle because that is how it looks, but when a star feels itself, it's not a twinkle, it's more like a throb. Star throbs. Over and over and over. Like this. Stars just throb and throb and throb and sometimes, when they can't throb anymore, when they can't hold it anymore, they fall out of the sky." -Tony Morrison

A man jumps off a boat and finally makes it to shore on an island in the Caribbean -- an island filled with images, past and present, disturbing and haunting, myth and legend. He discovers and falls instantly in love with a spunky sophisticate named Jadine. The story weaves its way through the island, the love story, and winds itself around Jadine's hosts and adopted family -- a rich, old-moneyed, Philadelphia factory owner and his wife and servants. While waiting for Christmas guests and family members, a fragile string is unwound which uncovers a deeply buried secret. After this secret surfaces, nothing is ever the same. Everyone present is caught in the tar baby of that secret, and the ramifications of its discovery affect everyone's lives ever after.

This is much more than a love story, however, the love story is exquisitely passionate, memorable, enlightening and poignant. This author is a masterful storyteller, and she completely captivates with mesmerizingly beautiful prose. Want to know more? Read this beautiful and disturbing book. Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: jadine in me
Review: i finally read this book because i was told by a close friend that i reminded her of jadine. once i began to read i instantly saw her point. jadine, perhaps the most interesting next to margret, is the 1990/2000 black woman. educated. successful. partially assimilated. but never quite whole. jadine has no counterpart. she is never truly satisfied with her success because her black man has failed to join her. the relationship between jadine and son (who is a classic case of the black boy who never develops into a man...see john singleton's babyboy)is classic because it is an illustration of the upwardly mobile woman trying to love a man who is sometimes strangled by his hostility and down right contrary nature. don't get me wrong, jadine is no angel, as she has plenty of identity issues, but i do see a lot of myself in her. why should she have to marry a white man? why can't her man grow up and live in the present world rather than his delusions and hostility. can we really blame jadine for wanting more?

Rating:
Summary: Of course, for HER, 3 stars is like 10 for somebody else....
Review: Yes, she's a great writer, but I did not enjoy this book as much as I adored Beloved and The Bluest Eye. Actually, this should be a play.

Now, I love reading plays, but the bouncing back and forth between a theater-like dialogue and "scenes from a novel" bothered me. I couldn't get into it as I have her other superb novels. I'll keep trying, however. This is my second run at it and I held on a bit longer. Frankly, I found Jadine rather boring, too. The stereotyping of all the characters wasn't oppressive - it just seemed too burlesque...once again, theater.

If I was a producer, I'd consider mounting "Tar Baby" on Broadway - and no, I am not talking musical comedy, though it has that quality, too.

Rating:
Summary: Morrison delves into intimate relationships
Review: Tar Baby appealed to me the second I picked it up from the rack. When I read the brief summary however, I just knew that this was going to be a "love story" with an expected ending. I was pleasantly suprised.

Tar Baby explores relationships--not just man and woman, but black and white, and black and black. It is a novel that creates societal stereotypes, and is persistent in tearing them down by the end of the story. Although there is an intimate relationship between two of the anchor characters, it serves as a definition of society and Morrison's point, and is not the focal point of the story.

A surprising ending--very different, and appealing to the novel. A very easy read; however, I enjoyed it when everything was quiet, and I could "put" myself into the novel as I read it.

Rating:
Summary: A satire with real bite
Review: "Tar Baby" may not be the most celebrated of Toni Morrison's many memorable novels, but, in my opinion, it's the most fun. Much of the story takes place at the Caribbean mansion of white millionaire Valerian Street. Morrison weaves a deliciously nasty psychodrama involving Street, his flaky wife, the Street's black servants, and Jadine, a young black woman who is niece to the servants and who has been educated thanks to Valerian's money. Into this mix Morrison tosses Son, a dreadlocked black man with a dangerous edge.

"Tar Baby" is a frequently outrageous satire of racial identity, sexual politics, consumer culture, class consciousness, and family dysfunctionality. Her cast of characters is colorfully warped in an almost Dickensian manner. Particularly interesting is the portrait of Jadine, the black wunderkind beloved by her wealthy white patrons; I think of her as a whorish postmodern parody of early African-American poet Phillis Wheatley.

As always, Morrison's writing is marked by passages of poetic power and grace. Check out, for example, this marvelous description of Son's hair: "Wild, aggressive, vicious hair that needed to be put in jail. Uncivilized, reform-school hair. Mau Mau, Attica, chain gang hair."

Ultimately, I read "Tar Baby" as a comic tragedy of people trapped in a complex web of racial, sexual, and economic mythologies. Profane, thought-provoking, ironic, and rich in scathing humor, this novel is ample proof of Toni Morrison's writerly talent.

Rating:
Summary: Tar Baby; Morrison's most accessible novel
Review: Because of the trickster elements inherent in most of Ms. Morrison's fiction, her work is often misunderstood or difficult to comprehend. Not so with Tar Baby. Although her literary style is beautifully wrought in this novel of racial and social classism, the fact that the story is linear and conclusive makes it more assessible for casual reading. Ms. Morrison does not shrink from her task of showing the inherent difficulties of the social construct that Americans struggle with in their attempt to define self and others in a hierarchical way. She brillantly illustrates the schizophrenia that such valuations of pigment gradation cause us. She further enhances this intuitive disconnect by developing within the story class gradations. The offensive title of the novel is intentional and confronts the reader immediately with the racist history of the English language in America.