Feb 21

Feb 21 Sula

Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Vintage Anchor
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

This rich and moving novel traces the lives of two black heroines from their close-knit childhood in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.

Nel Wright has chosen to stay in the place where she was born, to marry, raise a family, and become a pillar of the black community. Sula Peace has rejected the life Nel has embraced, escaping to college, and submerging herself in city life. When she returns to her roots, it is as a rebel and a wanton seductress. Eventually, both women must face the consequences of their choices. Together, they create an unforgettable portrait of what it means and costs to be a black woman in America.

Review

“She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be - for a woman. And that no one would ever be that version of herself which she sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand. There was only her own mood and whim, and if that was all there was, she decided to turn the naked hand toward it, discover it and let others become as intimate with their own selves as she was.”

I’m making my way through all of Toni Morrison’s fiction for the first time — and oh, how I loved this one. Her ability to use words to cut like a knife is absolutely unparalleled.

Sula is a story about Black women in the 1920s and 30s — it’s about the relationships that exist between Black women (motherhood, daughterhood, friendship, rivalry) and how different facets of society view Black women who live outside the bounds of what’s expected. It’s about fierceness, and love, and pain, and freedom. It’s thought-provoking, heartbreaking, frustrating, and beautiful all at the same time.

I also discovered (I’m late to the party, I know) that Toni narrated her novels’ audiobooks. I listened to her voice as I read along in a print copy, and I can’t even begin to tell you how much that enriched my experience. To hear her incredible words spoken just as she imagined them, while seeing them and appreciating them on the page in front of me — just wow. I’ll absolutely be reading all the rest of the books this way.