Mar 28

Mar 28 Song of Solomon

Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Vintage (this paperback edition)
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.

Full Review

What can I possibly say about Song of Solomon that hasn’t been said before, and a hundred ways? This was Toni Morrison’s third book and so third in my journey to read through all her novels, and she continues to blow me away in a way that I never could have been prepared for.

Song of Solomon is about a character named Milkman Dead (the first is a nickname, the second is real), and it follows him from childhood through adulthood, examining the way he internalizes and begins to acknowledge his gender and class privilege in a world that affords him no racial privilege, with so many complex relationships and morals. The second part of the book, in particular, blew my mind — she is just so good.

Toni Morrison’s ability to see into the human condition — hearts and minds and trauma and ego — is literally unparalleled. She writes characters that breathe with life and imperfection and yet feel like all of us. She writes words like birds use their wings: naturally and in a way the rest of us can only hope to imitate. The other people up for the Nobel Prize never stood a chance.