Song of Solomon

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Summary: A young black man struggling to fit into the world.
Review: This book must be read. It's a quick read, hard to put down. The ending is slightly disappointing, however. The protagonist, Milkman, is a real person. He doesn't always do the right thing, he makes mistakes. Written wonderfully.

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Summary: Song of Solomon
Review: I read Paradise and had trouble following the story. I read Jazz and liked it, but didn't feel it was great. This book keeps you reading and anticipating what comes next. A great story, written beautifully.

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Summary: Best book i've read in a long time!
Review: Toni Morrison has always been a writer that I wanted to read because she won the Nobel Prize, something that is rarely given to women. I don't know why I have put her books off until now, but i'm glad I started with Song of Solomon because it blew me away.
Morrison has a beautiful style of writing, it flows very calmly. Her writing and her beautiful descriptions paint an image of what she is portraying. In this book that is a small town with Macom Dead as the main character, aka. Milkman, but i'll let you figure out how he got the nickname. He is the son of the most wealthy man in this small town. The story takes us through his journey with the many strange characters he encounters.
Usually Nobel Laureauts have very thought provoking books that have a rather simple plot. I have nothing against this because I love thought provoking books and I don't need a building to explode on every page to keep my interest. But in this book Morrison does not show this style. This book has an extreamly rich plot that draws you in and doesn't let hold of you until you finish the book.
What this book does best is paint an image of a family full of characters that are fictional but relate to everyone of us. Themes of love, family, death and greed run throughout this magical unforgettable novel. Oh yeah! And it has very funny moments too!

I highly reccomend the Everyman's Library Edition. I orginally read it in it's Paperback edition, but the Hardback is a lot better because it comes with a timeline and other things that the paperback doesn't have. It's only a few extra dollars anyway.

Now I will rate the book on a scale of A-F like I do in my reviews.

Character Devolpment: A-
Plot: A+
Thought Provoking: B
Suspense: A

With an overall grade of an A this book is one that I will come back to again, and definetly an writer that I will continue to read.

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Summary: Shawns review is the bombdiggity word up to my homeboys
Review: I read almost all of this book but i had to put it down because it was not entertaining anymore. When i first started to read this book "Song of Soloman" i didnt really like it. I began reading it and it started to get better. About half way into it it got junk again. I dont really like the style of this authours' writing. It is too chunky and it doesnt flow that good. Although this author is highly praised i dont enjoy her work that much. This book was recommended to me by my mother. She loved and thought i would too. I would probably recommend this book to people that like a chunky style of writing and like to read stories that took place a long time ago.

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Summary: simply beutifull!!!
Review: TM is a master story teller when it comes to DRAMA.respecting readers intelligence..All the characters are well defined .She makes English sound beutiful...
Hats Off TM....

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Summary: A beautiful, timeless classic
Review: When I was a senior in high school, Toni Morrison's _Song of Solomon_ was assigned by the teacher of my A.P. English class. From the first chapter, the story completely overwhelmed me, sucked me in, and virtually changed my life.

I am now about to turn 30, and _Song of Solomon_ is still one of my three favorite books. Threaded beginning to end with the slave-symbolism of flying away in order to be free, the novel is filled with rich, realistic characters whom you feel you know as well as your own family. Milkman Dead, a troubled and cocky young man with an unfortunate nickname. Pilate Dead, his magical aunt, named when her illiterate father blindly pointed to a name in the bible. Milkman's sisters First Corinthians and Magdelene called Lena; his best friend Guitar, his cousin and lover Hagar. All beautiful black threads in the same quilt, all connected. They all love, and hate, and work, and fight for their own futures before the advent of the civil rights movement in America made it not _quite_ so dangerous to be of African descent.

Milkman grows and matures into a fully-realized individual as he traces his family background to a slave named Shalimar who was known to be able to fly. He gradually learns how to treat himself and others with respect, and a character that makes the reader cringe through the beginning of the novel makes us proud by the end. Every time I read this book (more than any of her others, though they're all good), I am amazed again by Toni Morrison's talent; she is truly one of the world's greatest writers. Read this book... I guarantee you will be a little bit changed by the time you reach the last page.

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Summary: Magical Prose
Review: Toni Morrison's 'Song of Solomon' is a novel filled with magical realism and feminine influence, peppered with spiritual revelation, and weighted by morality. A beautifully tragic story, Morrison exposes her characters almost to the point of humiliation but somehow manages to glorify the ironic beauty of human err. This novel is without a doubt one of the greatest American works of fiction of all time.

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Summary: The Dead legacy
Review: Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon" is a masterful example of the tradition of American mythical literature as developed by the giants Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Faulkner. Like other Faulkner-influenced authors such as William Gass and Cormac McCarthy, Morrison combines an impressionistic writing style with a special folklore, which she accents with portentous and often eerie moments of magical realism and individualizes with an original voice of the American black experience.

The subject of the novel is the morbidly named Dead family who, like Faulkner's Compsons and Bundrens, are entangled in a web of dynastic secrets that are revealed gradually throughout the story; their realm is not in the South but an unspecified city in Michigan. The father, Macon, is a landlord whose prosperity is due to his inflexibility with his tenants but whose failure as a family man is due to his strictness and cruelty to his wife Ruth and their three children. His son, who has acquired the humiliating nickname of Milkman as a result of being nursed by his mother long past the normal age, grows up to take over the family business and becomes the central character in the story.

Macon has a sister named Pilate who, after years of wandering around the country as a vagrant, has finally settled in a seedy neighborhood in Macon's city with her daughter and granddaughter and makes bootleg wine for a living. Possessing several mythical attributes, Pilate is like a figure out of folk legend: Her navel disappeared at birth, she has visions of her dead father, she keeps a dead man's bones in a sack in her house and her father's only written word in a small box hanging from her earlobe, and she seems able to alter her size at will. Macon sternly warns Milkman to keep away from her, which only adds to her mystique.

The plot thickens when Milkman, who has been kept under his father's wing all his life and seeks to escape, learns about some gold hidden in a cave near his father's boyhood farm in central Pennsylvania. His adventure to retrieve this treasure brings him to a fascinating woman named Circe who seems as mythical as Pilate -- not only are her name, indeterminate age, witchlike aura, and her pack of golden-eyed dogs allusions to the Homeric sorceress who turns men into swine; her appearance as a lonely and disgraced matron dwelling in an abandoned decaying mansion evokes images of Miss Havisham in "Great Expectations."

The novel's title is not just a Biblical allusion but a clue to Milkman's obscure ancestry, and the story becomes his quest to uncover the mystery of his family's identity. I was surprised and pleased by the ending, which seemed to be heading for emotional closure but instead builds into a crescendo of dramatic intensity and leaves the outcome ambiguous. Such uncompromising writing makes "Song of Solomon" a modern classic -- on every page it refuses to conform to any standard except that of true literary quality.

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Summary: Song of Solomon: An abriged version?
Review: Although I am usually a fan of Toni Morrison, I found this novel lengthy and rather confusing. Of course, the conclusion clears up all confusion, but I found the final scenes were rather anti-climatic. It seemed to me that after investing several hours (interrupted as they were) growing in wisdom with Milkman, I became just as interested as he about the origins of his family. Although I agree that Morrison displays great talent in pulling the reader into the story, I felt that after becoming intimately acquainted with all of the characters, (who were, by the way, wonderfully developed), the resolution seemed rushed. It seemed as though after hundreds of pages of conflict, suddenly everything clicked and Milkman was able to accept his personal history as well as the history of his ancestors.
Although it resembles a fairy tale "and they lived happily ever after" ending (as ironic as that phrase may seem, considering the events that end the story), I do not necessarily think that the novel should be made longer, as I found it difficult to get through as is. Rather that the plot builds up and leaves the reader disappointed.
In spite of this, because of its wonderful messages about life and eye-opening look into a rich culture and complex family, I do feel that this novel does have literary merit. While I would not necessarily recommend reading this particular novel, I would recommend exploring the themes it discusses and societal questions it raises.

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Summary: Don't Judge A Book By It's Cover
Review: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison started off as an assigned English project, but has become one of the most meaningful books I've read. After reading the romantic and poetic novel Beloved, I became a Toni Morrison fan. Song of Solomon seemed quite different when it began, and after the first couple of chapters I found myself a little lost. Yet once I was able to start putting the pieces together, I could barely put the book down. Milkman grew up without having ever truly lived, and on a quest for independence and wealth, he is able to find himself through his family heritage. Unknowingly, he traces his roots back to his great-grandfather who could "fly", and once Milkman realizes his discovery, he is able to free himself from what everyone else wants and expects of him, and able to make his own choice of how he wants to live (or end) his life. The characters were well developed, and although I couldn't personally relate to many of them, I was still able to picture them as real people with real impacts on each other.