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Women's Fiction

The Color Purple

The Color Purple

List Price: $19.95
Your Price: $19.95
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The Color Purple
Review: This book was written in diary form of communication between Celie and God. This was a good way of communication to express her inner emotion feelings. Celie had a really hard life, but she was always able to stay in a positive attitude. She struggles a lot through her life being an abused and uneducated black women. At the ending part she was able to have herslef realize that her was very well loved by everyone. This was a really good book.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The Color Purple
Review: This book the Color Purple is written in diary form as conversation between Celie and God. She was able to express her inner emotions by having these conversations with God. That helped to show her struggles that she is going through. As she starts going through life it gets really hard but, she is able to maintain a positive attitude. She was a abused and a uneducated black women. I really liked this book and i would recommend this book to everyone. It may see boring but it will get better as you read along.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Searching for
Review: Alice Walker's famous epistolary novel, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is a pulsating song of love. Celie is poor, black, and a woman in a time when any one of these would be enough to shatter one's spirit. Her children, born from incest, are taken from her, and later she's married off to a harsh man. She loses her beloved sister, and shuts herself down from life. Years go by and it's her husband's mistress Shug Avery who injects the fire of life into Celie, awakening her to the beauty of the world and of love, and ultimately leading her back to her lost sister. "The Color Purple" is an inspirational meditation on the nature of God, the mysteries of love, and the range of human frailties. The book is also #41 of the 100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Uplifting book to empower abuse victims -- A literary Gem
Review: This, of course, is Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize Winner. The story told from the perpective of a poor, fourteen-year-old black girl in the early 1900's rural Georgia, will want you to keep on reading it without pausing.

Living with her playful sister Nettie, and her sexually abusive father Alphonso, Celie (our heroine) learns life's tough lessons from the beginning. Having given birth to 2 children of rape, the father murdered both of them immediately. The self-absorbed matriarch has no qualms about selling Celie off to a middle aged widower, who needs someone to cook, clean and put up with his undisciplined children. He never quite saw Celie as a loving life partner, but rather a slave who was to mind her master.

Years pass, and Celie has grown up and lived with the frequent battering from her husband, but through it all remains strong and curious as is in her nature. Along the way Celie develops a unique relationship with a talented woman named Shug (who nonchalentely serves the purpose of a visiting mistress to Celie's husband), who through her loving nature, empowers Celie to take control and change her life.

"The Color Purple" is a deeply moving books. Its constant twists and surprises make for a sense of adventure. Realistic fiction at its best. I highly recommend this book, especially if you have NOT seen the brilliantly conceived Steven Spielberg film version. As always...the book is better!*****

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Emotional and heart-breaking
Review: This is the story of Celie, a woman you can't help but fall in love with during the course of reading this book. She has had a life filled with misery and heartbreak, but still has the strength to hope for more. When she marries a man she doesn't love and who harbors no feelings for her, her life seems destined to tragedy. But through her letters to her sister and her relatioship with Shug, a singer, she learns to look beyond her own horizon.

The reader learns about Celie through her letters to God and her sister Nettie. I have to admit, I don't usually like this format, so I put off reading this book for years. But the letter format truly helped create a close and personal bond between the reader and Celie. Celie is not well educated, so her writing is vernacular and phonetic, making the reading sometimes confusing, but the overall effect is one of empathy; the reader completely identifies with Walker's characters. At the end of the book, Walker calls herself a medium, a dead-on description; the characters are not so much fictional as they are conjured.

Sometimes the story can be less than gripping, but Walker makes up for this with raw emotion. While the plot may not necessarily keep the reader interested, the growth of the characters will. The Celie you know at the end of the book is not the woman introduced in the beginning.

This book takes you places you don't expect. Both physically, from the rural South to Africa and King Leopold, and spiritually, from oppression to freedom. Walker was raised in Georgia and educated at Wellesley, so she employees themes of sex and race. All of these converge into a beautiful portrait of hope, love, and pride that will long be remembered as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: What you got
Review: You surly do feel for the main character Celie, but the book could have been a drop more powerful. Something was missing. I expected more. But you sure did get an awful lot anyhow.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: a GOOD book
Review: This wasn't a great book, it was little short of that, but it was definitely a good book. I loved how it covered controversial subjects. And it was poetically written. There were a few things I didn't like about it, but maybe I'm just used to a different culture than that which is presented in the book. It is a very nice book though.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Touching and Inspirational!
Review: I loved this book, and I must tell you that it was heart wrenching and inspirational. I read it for English 3 in my junior year and loved it. My only complaint about it was that it was slightly racist. But everyone should read this book. It's about abuse and self discovery. Celie is afraid of men because every man she has encountered has raped, beaten, and abused her. She finds hope with in a homosexual relationship with Shug, and she finds out what it really means to be a woman. It's a great book that will make you think and cry.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Finest Violet
Review: The Color Purple is an dazzeling novel by Alice Walker. This book was in one word, inspirational. An African American woman, living in the deepth of poverty learns to become and individual. Celie over comes child abuse, spousal abuse, and having her children taken from her. The man she knows as her father rapes her,gives her children away, and seperates her and her sister, which to Celie is her best friend, and helps her get though life. No woman should have to go through what she went through. This book is ideal for an audience of ages 14 and up. There are some graphic details about her rape. As I read this book I felt anger and frustration for her. She is constantly put down and told she could never be an individual. Her husband doesn't love her. He just needed someone to raise his children. He has his mistress living under the same roof, though Celie becomes friends with her. Everyone calls her ugly and people just use her. The style of this book, written in journal form, gave the book a more personable feel. when she writes, she is talking with god. As I read the book I shared the same emotions as Celie. The diction was acceptable to the character being raw and misspelled, yet made it hard to understand what the book was saying. The book is so inspirational to me. She faces challenges and overcomes them and she still sees the beauty of life. the ending brings hope to everyone in the world, that may be why i love this book so much. I highly recommend this book to women, or to Anyone who needs an inspiration.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A colourful tale...
Review: It began with Celie. Writing letters to God. Under the strong instruction from her father never to tell anyone but God about his abuse, that is who Celie turns to.

This book is written in the form of correspondence, an exchange of letters that as often as not doesn't end up being read by the intended readers for most of a lifetime.

There is abuse, child abuse, sexual abuse, pain that no one should have to go through. They go through it. Celie is a strong enough person to realise that her father might not stop with her, and feels protective of her younger sister.

'Sometime he still be looking at Nettie, but I always git in his light. Now I tell her to marry Mr. _____. I don't tell her why. I say Marry him, Nettie, an try to have one good year out your life. After that, I know she be big.'

Celie delivered children of her father, children who were cast away, presumably dead (although Celie has the intuition to know better).

Celie put up with separation from loved ones, and a loveless, unfaithful marriage, playing second-fiddle to a more flamboyant mistress, Shug Avery. And Celie was raised not to know she deserved better.

She deserved better.

Shug Avery ironically was one who helped teach her that. There was a friendship beyond words that developed, a realisation of humanity and caring beyond the abuses of the world; Shug was neglected by her father, a pain that cut her almost as deep as Celie's pain.

But Celie found out something. Alphonso, her Pa, wasn't her Pa--he was a step. The children weren't to be shunned. The worst sin was mitigated just a bit.

And Celie and Nettie found out more. The land and house belonged to them, not to 'Pa', but rather their real daddy, who left it to them and their mother.

This is a painful story. It is a hopeful story. The courage of the women against family and societal tyranny is strong, but the courage against their own fears and shortcomings is even stronger.

Now, you may be asking, what right does a white man have in reviewing this kind of book? White people are very peripheral in the story, never central, never figuring more than just side characters, and not very human ones at that. I review this book in the hopes that it will be more widely read by those of every colour, as it gives insight into a different side of the human condition that is so far beyond my experience that, without this book, I would never have realised such things are possible.

Such despair. Such longing. Such courage. Such victory.

God is present even in the pain, even in the absence, and Celie resists (much more than I would, or indeed do in less severe circumstances) to judge God. She may be angry at times, but always faithful in her own way.

She believes in her family, even when it isn't deserved. She believes in herself in the end, when it is needed.

The Color Purple -- what does that mean? This is the symbol of God. The royal colour, the sign that all can see, that God is present and has a plan for beauty. This story is beautiful, even in its darkest moments.

'Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I'm still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?). Not the little wildflowers. Nothing.'

Celie learns to see. Learns to love. Even to forgive a little. She finds the love of God in her family.

I am richer for having read this story. I think everyone would be.


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