As some of you know, I have decided to read all of the Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century collection. This includes Toni Morrison's Beloved. I was supposed to read it for my high school junior English class. I never read any books for school, so this one got skipped over as well. Because of my old teacher Jill Lyday's and Oprah's great love of the book I decided it was not for me and wrote it off. This posed a problem with my goal so I decided to suck it up and read the book.

Toni Morrison does tell a good story. The graphic nature of the book lends itself self well to her descriptive ability. The only thing I disliked about it was how Morrison used strange phrase adjectives like "the crawling already? baby". Sure it gets the point across, but it seemed rather awkward. The lack of chapter numbers and the fact that the story is not linear at all makes some parts a little difficult to understand, but the more you read, the more things fall together. I enjoyed the characters of Paul D, Sixo, and Stamp Paid. I may have been biased against the character of Sethe because of Oprah's decision to play her in her self financed movie adaptation. I could not get the image of Oprah out of my hand so my impression of Sethe may have suffered for it. Denver seemed weak at first but by the end you can see she has a very nice arc.

I must admit I did not really want to like this book, but I was willing to give it a chance. Morrison gets he story across in a manner that is not too heavy handed. All in all it is an enjoyable read. I wish she would have given more back story and not just replayed the same events over and over, but that's just me. Morrison is an important author, but I don't know if this is her best work.

Byron Schaller resided at In The Congo dot com.