Beloved

Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully Powerful
Review: This book is very powerful. Once you read it, you will want to read it over and over to understand everything that happened, but you won't be able to. Morrison effectively mimics humans' process of remembering what was once forgotten. In addition, she shows the hardships that African Americans had to deal with and how the traumas of their lives affected them.

Rating:
Summary: Moving and Beautiful
Review: This was quite an interesting book. Although I found it to be quite difficult, I found myself connected to the struggle that bestows the characters. How their past greatly scars their future, and how they continue to live with it is remarkable. Going into the mind of an ex-Afican-slave has to be one of the most unbelievable masterpieces in the history of novelsas it is portrayed in Beloved. Toni Morrison is one of the few great novelist of our time.

Rating:
Summary: Something's missing.
Review: This is an eminently teachable book, probably the singlemost read text by students at my school over the past ten years. The supernatural elements, ghost story trappings (compare the basic plot to "Poultergeist" and "The Exorcist") and sensational (but tastefully presented) sex and violence make for instant accessibility for most students. As for the Faulknerian stream of consciousness and shifting points of view, students seem to have little difficulty once they are shown how to read it. But at other levels, the work fails to measure up to the greatest literature. The characters are types--good or bad, oppressed or oppressors; the themes are often obvious and paper thin (eg. Baby Suggs' revision of the Sermon on the Mount into a black pride message); the male characters, including Paul D., are objects of female fantasy; the imagery (water, corn, trees, characters' names) is contrived and repetitious. Two things of value emerge from the reading experience: the coming of age story of Sethe's daughter, Denver, and the use of Beloved as a metaphor for the holocaust that was the pre-emancipation African-American experience. But there is more complexity, depth, and fidelity to that experience and its transformation from suffering into art in James Baldwin's short story, "Sonny's Blues."

Rating:
Summary: Strong Women
Review: I was required to read this book for my Advanced Placement English class, and I must say in the begining I found it to be very bizzare. Though as the story progressed I came to love it! The women of the book, to me, are so strong. They have been through so much but they continue to live, and they become stronger than they were before. It is a book that proves anything can be overcome if you have faith in yourself. Toni Morrison does an amazing job at making you feel a deeply personal conection to her characters. Denver is my favorite of the characters in this book, because she begins so closed and empty (afraid of her own mother), and becomes a quite strong and capable women. This book shows the horrors of what some people can endure, but the calming aftermath that can come if you believe. I rated this book a Five, because of it touched me as one of the best works I've ever read. I applaud Toni Morrison, and am anxious to read more of her books.

Rating:
Summary: *~*Beloved*~*
Review: I think that this book was great, althought it was quiet wierd and twisted, it still was an excellent book. The great detail and historical accuracy, made the characters in the book amazing. After a while(for me at least)they are not charaters but people, and you start beliving that they are real wich makes this book so wonderfull and hard to put down. I belive that this book will become one of the greats of our time and a classic.

Rating:
Summary: Disturbing, Beautiful book
Review: The beginning of this book and the horrors of slavery all the way through are heartrending. Being a WASPy guy raised in the American South this book was a disturbing eyeopener. It was also an exceptionally strong story of relationships and overcoming adversity. It was difficult reading but worth the effort.

Rating:
Summary: Surprising it was better than I thought
Review: Well, after much hestitation and putting it off I finally sat down to read this book. I was surprised to find it a good story. Its a story about freedom, remaining free at all cost. Its about community and watching out for one another. Then, there is Beloved who is looking for love from the person who took life away from her. I guess hearing so much about the book, I was able to understand the symbolisms that I think I would have normally missed. The reading is slow, its difficult, but if you take your time it comes together. Even if you don't understand something, I found it will be revealed later in the book, just hold on.

Rating:
Summary: The Power of One Mother's Love
Review: What kind of mother would deliberately cause the destruction of her own beloved child? This is the question Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner (and probably the greatest woman novelist of the twentieth century), Toni Morrison, explores in her rich, densely-layered novel, Beloved.

Set after the end of the Civil War, when slaves were freed by emancipation, but still victims of random acts of violence, the book also serves as a metaphor for the legacy of slavery and asks the chillingly relevant question: Why is the leading cause of death among young, African-American men murder by another black?

Beloved's protagonist is Sethe, an escaped slave and mother of four. Her joy at successfully escaping her former master while pregnant and giving birth before finally finding refuge at her spiritually-nourishing mother-in-law's home, vanishes a mere twenty-eight days later.

The sight of a cruel white slave owner's hat sends Sethe and her children running to a woodshed where she is forced to confront demons no loving mother should ever have to face.

Sethe's demons do not disappear when she emerges from the woodshed, however, and settles down in a small Ohio town. Instead, they remain to both haunt her and help her to understand the violence that occurred so many years previously.

Morrison, as skillful a storyteller as ever lived, spins a gorgeously heartbreaking tale in Beloved, and one whose plot is impossible to predict. With a mastery of language given to only a few, this extraordinarily talented author weaves subplot upon subplot and brings each exquisitely created character to life.

There is Paul D, another slave who escaped from the same plantation as did Sethe but who has not seen Sethe for more than a decade when he once again encounters her and the two of them contemplate what they hope will finally be a bright future for both.

There is Denver, Sethe's daughter, a troubled and isolated teenager whose life encompasses little more than her immediate surroundings and whose social interactions have dwindled down to embrace only her mother and the ghost of her long-dead sister.

And then, there is Beloved, the centerpiece of this exquisitely wirtten, lyrically beautiful book.

While Sethe appears to embrace a logic that says, "Before the while man destroys you, let me do it," Morrison, herself, tells us that it is time for us to look beyond the past and move on.

Today, more than twenty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, African Americans are, in many ways, worse off than they were before. The question plaguing most black Americans seems to be whether to cast their lot with the whites of the community or to separate, turn inward and seek their own redemption...alone.

In Beloved, Morrison uses the character of Ella, one of the leaders of her small Ohio community, to metaphorically explore this issue. "Whatever Sethe had done, Ella didn't like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present...Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past was something to leave behind. And if it didn't stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out. Slave life; freed life; every day was a test and trial. Nothing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem. 'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,' and nobody needed more; nobody needed a grown up evil sitting at the table with a grudge. As long as the ghost showed out from its ghostly place, shaking stuff, crying, smashing and such--Ella respected it. But if it took flesh and came in her world, well, the shoe was on the other foot. She didn't mind a little communication between the two worlds, but this was an invasion."

Beloved is first and foremost a brilliantly crafted and mesmerizing story, faultlessly told by one of the world's most gifted storytellers. It is a story of ghosts--those that haunt Sethe and those that haunt all of us. Beloved is not magic realism, nor does it contain elements of magic realism. Magic realism, by its very nature, requires that the fantastic be accepted as mundane by those experiencing it. There is certainly nothing mundane about Morrison's ghost and her acceptance by Sethe.

Although most of the novel's characters ostracize Sethe and blame her for her past, Morrison, herself, does not. Instead, she wisely extends a vision of harmony to the black community that exhorts them to let go of their past, no matter how painful, and move ahead.

Beloved and Sethe must, eventually, come to terms with the past and with each other, just as the community must come to terms with itself.

In the end, Beloved's protagonists decide on different paths to follow, some of which are quite surprising, although always heart-rending.

Morrison, however, remains true to the vision she created in Beloved: those who cannot let go of the past will ultimately self-destruct; those who can respect its lessons and mourn its loss but not feel indebted to right its wrongs, will find themselves endowed with unexpected, joyous freedom.

Rating:
Summary: not a story to pass on...
Review: You will not only find this novel difficult to put down, you will find it difficult to put out of your head. I have had wonderful--often heated and wildly divergent--discussions of this novel in both my Lit. classes and my bookclub. I would urge anyone who reads this book to seek out other readers to discuss it with--you will probably be surprised at their interpretation of symbols or events in the story. While Morrison depicts the devestating repercussions of slavery, the story is not completely bleak, and it gets even better with every re-reading. Even without discussion, the prose is challenging but rewarding, and the story is unforgettable. Put this novel on your "must read" list.

Rating:
Summary: Literature
Review: Along with Song of Solomon, this is Morrison's best book. It is a sophisticated narrative told with zest and poetry, and a deeply experimental, philosophical novel that dares to intervene in history. Morrison hits all the right notes. A classic.