God Help the Child

Okay, so I found this story VERY hard to get into. Toni Morrison's style is that she sort of just throws you into a story and trusts that you can figure out where you are. Plus she lives in a very harsh world where a lot of bad things happen. But since it's a Toni Morrison novel I stuck with it and I will say that I'm glad I did.

The crux of the story focuses on the relationship between Bride and Booker. Bride's a beautiful cosmetics executive and Booker is, well, we aren't exactly sure what Booker is. But when Booker leaves Bride, her world falls apart, and she has to figure out a way to get it back.

But this being Toni Morrison, the story of Bride and Booker is part of a larger discussion about how the way parents raise their children affects them as adults, and how the things that are done to children - and the things they see done to others - affect their personalities. Morrison's world is not a very nice place, and many of the adults in it experienced some pretty horrible things in their childhoods. In fact that's probably why I found the book so hard to get into.

My biggest disappointment with the book is that Rain, the character I found most interesting and wanted to get to know better, was only a tiny part of the story. But I guess that was Morrison's intention, to just have Rain drift in and out of Bride's, and the reader's, life.

God Help the Child