her name was at the top of my 'authors i have never read, much to my great personal shame' list along with tolstoy, balzac, alice munro, etc. This one gets 4 'please don't hit me again, sula!' stars.Īnd honestly, for more than half of it, it was leaning towards 5 stars, and not just because of stockholm syndrome. Looking for great books to read during black history month.and the other eleven months? i'm going to float some of my favorites throughout the month, and i hope they will find new readers! I can't wait to read The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon.īlog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Youtube Morrison is just one of those authors that seems to understand certain aspects of life and human nature better than the rest of us.

This is a book that in less than two hundred pages takes you deep into the despair and loneliness of life in the Bottom, and at the centre of this is Sula herself. but it is hard not to feel deeply for her. Their close friendship is pulled apart by an act that is at once straight-forward, unforgivable without question, but also complex and multilayered. But it's essentially about Nel and Sula growing up - surrounded by racism, injustice and segregation - and becoming women, discovering their sexuality in very different ways, and living very different lives. It's a short, hard-hitting story that I would call a bildungsroman if that didn't seem a little trite. I could tell immediately that it was the kind of book I love: small town politics and gossip, intricate relationship dynamics, and gritty no-holds-barred storytelling. Sula is, at times, a strange book it is about an intense, complicated relationship between two black women - Sula and Nel - from the 1920s to the 1940s. She creates characters who burn with an inextinguishable fire, and she does it through a series of carefully-written moments ugly, heartbreaking scenes that somehow capture a person, a time, a place or an injustice in full. Toni Morrison's writing is frank and uncompromising. Reading this, I can't understand what took me so long to pick up another. Before Sula, I had only read Beloved, which is also a great book. I have known for some time that I haven't read enough Toni Morrison. Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.Ĥ 1/2 stars.

Sula first edition