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A novel
by Toni Morrison
Book Reviewed by:Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child—the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment—weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult.
The new novel from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.
Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child is a searing tale about the way childhood trauma shapes and misshapes the life of the adult. At the center: a woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life; but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love until she told a lie that ruined the life of an innocent woman, a lie whose reverberations refuse to diminish ... Booker, the man Bride loves and loses, whose core of anger was born in the wake of the childhood murder of his beloved brother ... Rain, the mysterious white child, who finds in Bride the only person she can talk to about the abuse she's suffered at the hands of her prostitute mother ... and Sweetness, Bride's mother, who takes a lifetime to understand that "what you do to children matters. And they might never forget."
Life, as shown to us in God Help the Child, is hard and often painful, even if there is hope that circumstances can and do get better. Inhabiting her characters' lives and voices, in a story told from multiple perspectives, Morrison examines the beauty and ugliness in all our lives, in a memorable story, skillfully told...continued
Full Review
(508 words)
(Reviewed by Kate Braithwaite).
In the opening paragraph of God Help the Child, Toni Morrison gives voice to Sweetness, a woman describing herself as "light-skinned with good hair, what we call high yellow," who gives birth to a child with very dark skin. She says, "It didn't take no more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs to realize something was wrong. Really wrong. She was so black she scared me. Midnight black, Sudanese black."
Sweetness is about to make her own daughter a victim of colorism.
The term "colorism," first coined in a 1982 essay by Alice Walker, describes prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically amongst people of the same ethnic or racial group. The issue is not confined to ...
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