Beloved
Beloved by Toni Morrison, 1987
Final Verdict: ★★★★★
A beautiful and masterful book - a real, raw account of life through Morrison's powerful poetic voice. Even if only based partly on a true story, it still carries the heavy weight of love: the freedom to choose to love, and the devastation of death to the loved.
A three-dimensional, almost four-dimensional, portrayal of the horrors and inhumanity of slavery, with characters who are so real and so humanized by Morrison.
Morrison pulls on the heavy dilemma to love that (I think) we all feel: the fear that what we love will be broken by the world, scaring us into not wanting to love at all—to not get too attached to parts of this beautiful life, so that when they inevitably fail we won't be dragged down with them.
"Risky ... for a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous. Especially if it was her children she had settled on to love.
The best thing he knew was to love everything just a little bit. Just a little bit.
So when they broke its back, or shoved it down a sack, then you'd still have a little love left over for the next one."
But, I want to say thank you to this book. It is really, really powerful. Morrison coaxes the desire, the courage, to love out of the reader again after these 10 hours (I listened to it as an audiobook. Highly recommend, because the author herself reads it with an energy no one else could).
It's our choice to love. And life is beautiful, waiting to be beloved.
If you made it this far … wow, congrats! I’m still working on my writing skills and effective communication - but I really, really tried to communicate how strongly I felt about this book.
More mediocre book reviews can be found on my Goodreads! Thanks for reading ☺︎