Skip to main content

Review: God Help the Child by Toni Morrison


     I read this book courtesy of my friend Shanille, who purchased it for a class on the novels of Toni Morrison (!!!) and lent it to me when she was done.  Thank you girl!
     As usual, this book did not disappoint.  It is about a beautiful, successful, dark-skinned woman named Bride who sets out on a journey to confront an ex-lover, and by extension the many traumas she has experienced both as a child and an adult on account of other people's perceptions of her skin color.  
     My favorite aspect of the story is its characters, because they are drawn in such precise and lush detail.  Bride, for example, has constructed her outward appearance in order to thriveFor example, she goes by 'Bride' rather than her given name, Lula Ann Bridewell, and exclusively wears white clothing, in accordance with the advice of a lifestyle consultant.  At one point, she refers to herself as "The [woman] driving a Jaguar in an oyster-white cashmere dress and boots of brushed rabbit fur the color of the moon," a description which I find both delicious and disturbing (80).  It's delicious because of words like cashmere and Jaguar and oyster and rabbit fur.  The whole line drips with luxury and texture.  But it's disturbing because Bride is describing herself through the things around her rather than the things that she is, as if she has lost track of her self.  Perhaps that is the cost of the constructions she erected, first to protect herself from insults targeting her dark skin, and later to succeed in the overwhelmingly white world of business.  Morrison's first contemporary novel beautifully exposes the ugly forces which caused Bride to make these sacrifices, and the power which Bride must wield to transform these sacrifices into affluence, admiration, and glamour.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Lessons to be Learned From the Princess Sara Crewe

          Have any of you read  A Little Princess  by Frances Hodgson Burnett?  It was the book that made me love books.  (Does every book-lover have one of those?  Do you?)  I first read it when I was very little and have spent the last two days rereading it, as I tend to do every few years.             But the thing that struck me about the story this time around is that the story's preteen heroine, Sara Crewe, seems to have life completely figured out.  Even when she loses both her father and her fortune and is working as a hated scullery maid at her London boarding school to pay off her debts, she never sacrifices her virtues of benevolence, hope, and grace.  Her secret is that she considers herself a princess in spirit, even when she is no longer as wealthy and privileged as one.  Sadly, I have not yet gotten my life philosophies together and lack Sara's ability to gracefully accept whatever life throws at me.  So, in order to stop feeling inferior, I have compiled a l

Junkie Metaphors and Books About Our Inner Crazy

    So, recently I was doing a spot of (mandatory) community service for my gym teacher when I experienced a rare instance of karmic payoff.      Me and a bunch of other temporary bond-slaves were unloading this huge file cabinet onto the gym floor, sorting everything from Dance Revolution DVDs to pamphlets on Your First Visit to the Ob-Gyn! into neat piles, when I uncovered quite by chance a crumbling copy of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs.  Elated, I carried it around for the remainder of the period until my teacher took pity on me and offered to let me borrow it. It's falling apart before my very eyes I swear...      I fell in love with this book the moment I heard its title quite a while ago - Naked Lunch ?  What the hell kind of weird awesome twisted name is that?  I am only now realizing how twisted it really is.  The book is a compilation of notes that Burroughs took while under the sick influence of heroin.  It is rife with disgusting sex scenes and metaphors for

My Irrelevant Opinion on Teen Dystopias

     I read books indiscriminately.  I am just as happy reading  Beowulf, a crusty old Scandinavian epic poem, as I am reading  The Fault in Our Stars  by John Green.  So I'm not a snob who only reads first-edition classics bound in leather or anything like that.  But I do have one requirement when it comes to the books I read and recommend, and that is that they be good .  And I do see a problem emerging in one of YA's most popular new genres, the teen dystopian novel, and that is that many of these books are not good.      The dystopia craze started, I believe, with the success of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (a book that I very much adore) .   It's hard to make it as a writer, so when people saw how well her parable of futuristic teen angst and bloodshed did, they understandably thought Aha!  Here is the formula for success!!   And ten seconds later, the front display tables of every Barnes and Nobles' across the country were weighted down with hardcovers fea