First time visiting BookBrowse? Get a free copy of our members' ezine today.

Summary and Reviews of Beloved by Toni Morrison

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Beloved

by Toni Morrison
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Readers' Rating:
  • First Published:
  • Oct 1, 2006, 360 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jun 2004, 352 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About This Book

Book Summary

Beloved is Morrison's undisputed masterpiece. It elegantly captures hers trademark touches: elegant prose, fantastical occurrences, striking characters, and racial tension.

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.

1

I24 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old--as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once--the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

Chicago Sun-Times
Toni Morrison’s finest work. . . . [It] sets her apart [and] displays her prodigious talent.

Los Angeles Times - John Leonard
A masterwork. . . . Wonderful. . . . I can’t imagine American literature without it.

New York Review of Books
Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature.

Newsweek
A masterpiece. . . . Magnificent. . . . Astounding. . . . Overpowering.

People
A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story. . . . Read it and tremble.

San Francisco Chronicle
Brilliant. . . . Resonates from past to present.

The New Yorker
There is something great in Beloved: a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. It gets you.

The Plain Dealer
Beautifully written. . . . Powerful. . . . Toni Morrison has become one of America’s finest novelists.

The Village Voice
Compelling . . . . Morrison shakes that brilliant kaleidoscope of hers again, and the story of pain, endurance, poetry and power she is born to tell comes right out.

Library Journal
Powerful is too tame a word to describe Toni Morrison's searing new novel of post-Civil War Ohio...A fascinating, grim, relentless story.

Publishers Weekly
Mixed with the lyric beauty of the writing, the fury in Morrison's . . . book is almost palpable...a haunting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath set in rural Ohio in the wake of the Civil War...brilliantly conceived story . . . should not be missed.''

Reader Reviews

Cathryn Conroy

The Plot Will Break Your Heart, But the Writing Will Make Your Soul Sing
The plot of this book will break your heart, but the writing will make your soul sing. Masterfully written by Toni Morrison, this is a book that is destined to be a classic and still avidly read generations from now. While it is the story of a ...   Read More
Bedur Alshrif

Beloved
While reading Beloved, I found myself enjoying Morrison's eloquence. Although the book is set in the 1800s, I found myself understanding it easily after I got the timelines. She drew me in and made my experience what the characters were going through...   Read More
Theresa Bradley

A Classic in Any Eye
Though slavery was over long before I was even thought of, the book Beloved by Toni Morrison carried me back to some of the darkest years in world history. Sethe, the main character, escapes slavery and has to deal with the personal trauma in which ...   Read More
Mainali R. K.

Heart Touchability
The renown masterpiece 'BELOVED' by Toni Morison is a heart touching piece of art about blacks and the treatment done by whites. This novel clearly and vividly portrays the miserable condition of Negroes. It also makes the reader aware about the ...   Read More

Write your own review!

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Beloved, try these:

  • Let Us Descend jacket

    Let Us Descend

    by Jesmyn Ward

    Published 2024

    About this book

    More by this author

    From Jesmyn Ward—the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow—comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.

  • The Prophets jacket

    The Prophets

    by Robert Jones Jr.

    Published 2022

    About this book

    A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence.

We have 15 read-alikes for Beloved, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by Toni Morrison
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: The Message
    The Message
    by Ta-Nehisi Coates
    It does not surprise me that Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Message is one of the most important books I've ...
  • Book Jacket
    The House of Doors
    by Tan Twan Eng
    Every July, I take on the overly ambitious goal of reading all of the novels chosen as longlist ...
  • Book Jacket: The Puzzle Box
    The Puzzle Box
    by Danielle Trussoni
    During the tumultuous last days of the Tokugawa shogunate, a 17-year-old emperor known as Meiji ...
  • Book Jacket
    Something, Not Nothing
    by Sarah Leavitt
    In 2020, after a lifetime of struggling with increasingly ill health, Sarah Leavitt's partner, ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

The silence between the notes is as important as the notes themselves.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

X M T S

and be entered to win..