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A review by santreads
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
5.0
Everyone knows of The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Of course, everyone does. It won the Pulitzer making Alice Walker the first African American to ever win the award. The book got adapted to the big screen by Steven Speilberg and Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg acted their asses off in it. But I didn’t watch the movie, nor the trailer because I wanted to read the book first. This went on for a long period of time till I finally got to it yesterday and finished it in one day. And let the world know, this book DESERVES EVERYTHING. If you too are like me and haven’t read this book, I suggest you go out there and read this book asap.
The book follows two sisters - Celie and Nettie. Both born in the South of the US. I always thought this book would deal with slavery, but it did not. It spoke of it, sure. But that wasn’t the core of this book. At the core of this book was love. And you could feel it.
I don’t want to spoil the book for many people because I don’t like to spoil things either, but let me tell you, I’m shocked and in awe as to how Alice Walker spoke about so many issues and intertwined them in her prose so flawlessly. Be it domestic abuse, rape, child abuse, racial discrimination, incarceration of black Americans for petty crimes, colonization and the superiority the whites feel they have the ‘natives’.
But what I was most in awe of was how she spoke of lesbian love and how it was all just natural. Celie’s love was true love and she wasn’t confused about it. It was what it was. There was no inner turmoil. I found that so refreshing.
I absolutely loved the characters in the book and you saw through the book and their lives, they grew, changed, accepted themselves and the others around them. Ohhh, and the women. Such strong role models! They were brazen, self assured, and took no man’s shit. I saw this especially in Shug and Sophia, but it was there in all the women.
Little note here: I find it interesting the way Walker showed us these two headstrong women - Sophia and Shug in the beginning. Both so headstrong. With Sophia, she took the route of breaking her down and making her meek by incarcerating her and welding to their ways. But she never really was welded. She broke through and became herself towards the end. With Shug, she rejected societal norms and society rejected her. She decided to sing, be brazen in her own sexuality and profited off it.
Similarly, we see two meek characters such as Celie and Squeak. They both were meek in the beginning but soon they came into their own when they were taught that they didn’t have to bow down to man and were given some assurance and love. They grew with confidence.
Nettie I think is a mixture of these two kinds of women. I liked that.
Long story short, this book was brilliant and deserves everything.
The book follows two sisters - Celie and Nettie. Both born in the South of the US. I always thought this book would deal with slavery, but it did not. It spoke of it, sure. But that wasn’t the core of this book. At the core of this book was love. And you could feel it.
I don’t want to spoil the book for many people because I don’t like to spoil things either, but let me tell you, I’m shocked and in awe as to how Alice Walker spoke about so many issues and intertwined them in her prose so flawlessly. Be it domestic abuse, rape, child abuse, racial discrimination, incarceration of black Americans for petty crimes, colonization and the superiority the whites feel they have the ‘natives’.
But what I was most in awe of was how she spoke of lesbian love and how it was all just natural. Celie’s love was true love and she wasn’t confused about it. It was what it was. There was no inner turmoil. I found that so refreshing.
I absolutely loved the characters in the book and you saw through the book and their lives, they grew, changed, accepted themselves and the others around them. Ohhh, and the women. Such strong role models! They were brazen, self assured, and took no man’s shit. I saw this especially in Shug and Sophia, but it was there in all the women.
Similarly, we see two meek characters such as Celie and Squeak. They both were meek in the beginning but soon they came into their own when they were taught that they didn’t have to bow down to man and were given some assurance and love. They grew with confidence.
Nettie I think is a mixture of these two kinds of women. I liked that.
Long story short, this book was brilliant and deserves everything.