Apr 27

Apr 27 Tar Baby

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

Ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary, Tar Baby is Toni Morrison’s reinvention of the love story. Jadine Childs is a black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.

TL;DR Review

Tar Baby wasn’t my favorite of Toni’s novels, but there’s still just no denying that she is one of the greatest writers in all of history.

For you if: You like Toni Morrison’s early work and want to read another — one that will feel familiar but also do new and different things.

Full Review

“It was a silly age, twenty-five; too old for teenaged dreaming, too young for settling down. Every corner was a possibility and a dead end.”

I’m making my way through all of Toni Morrison’s novels this year; Tar Baby was her fourth, and so I read it in April. Once again, this one feels familiar alongside her other work, undeniably Toni, and yet once again it also feels different and distinct. It wasn’t my favorite one, but there’s no denying that she’s one of the greatest writers in history.

Most of Tar Baby takes place on an island in the Caribbean, where a wealthy white man, his trophy wife, their Black butler and cook, and their butler’s niece Jadine are living. When a man named Son finds his way into the household, the tension that spills forth brings ugly secrets out of the woodwork and breaks their quiet life to smithereens. Meanwhile, Son and Jadine see the start of an explosive roller coaster of a love affair that carries them all the way to NYC and Florida and back.

I think that I was mostly just not in the right mindset for the first half of this book, which was paced so, so slowly. And yet even in my impatience, I couldn’t help but marvel at the way she switches between beautiful description full of metaphor and quick, cutting, ping-pong-like dialogue. And then…the second half!! Holy moly, lol. I don’t know why I expected anything less than volcanic eruption from Toni. And then the ending, another stunner. Of course, as well, so many themes and layers all throughout.

I’m looking forward to Beloved in May!