A review by sundazebookcafe
Beloved by Toni Morrison

challenging dark emotional reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I’m not entirely sure where to begin with Beloved, this complex novel that unfurls dark, horrifying layers to piece together an almighty, painful story and stories. In post-American Civil War Ohio, Sethe – a formerly enslaved woman – and her family are living in a (haunted) house, reckoning with their new lives in the wake of the abolition of slavery. Naturally, Beloved is full of heavy topics, including slavery but also many others that I recommend looking up trigger warnings for.

Haunted by the ghost of ‘Beloved’, her two-year-old child, Sethe then also reunites with somebody from her past and, soon, past meets present as a young woman around the age Sethe’s late daughter would have been appears in her life. Through dense prose thickly laced with poetic narrative devices, Morrison weaves a patchwork story that feels cloying and nightmarish, a fitting way to tell the horrors that belay those directly affected by slavery. I read this with a notebook to hand so I could pick apart the tiny moving doors and threads that took us deeper into Sethe’s history, Denver’s story, Paul D’s worst nightmares, until the circumstances of Beloved’s death come to light.

Beloved is not an easy read both for its subject matter and linguistic style, but it is an incredibly moving and haunting story that’ll stay with me for a long, long time.