Reviews

What a journey.
Just finished rereading this. It had been YEARS.
I will always love what Toni demanded of us as readers.
This book is so much about so much: community, belief, zeoltry, secrecy, desire, escape, patriarchy, violence, the search for freedom and care, or just to feel something.
I still don't know if Gigi, Pallas, or Seneca was the white girl, who they shot first...

The last time I read Paradise I was 21 yrs old. I was just learning to love reading actual whole books. I was maybe in my 2nd year of college. It was the third Morrison book I read, after my African American studies instructor Mr. McDonald introduced me to the Bluest Eye. Rereading Paradise book fucked with me in two ways. First, I was confronted, through annotations, with who I was, how I understood the world, and how I read literature 20 yrs ago. It was like meeting my younger, insecure, but curious self again. A sort of ghost me. There were flatout misreads, attention to details that didn’t matter, but still strong connections and takeaways; we be knowing when we don’t actually know much. The other layer was just marveling at the craft and difficulty of Morrison after so many years engaging with her work. There were parts and pieces of the narrative I still recalled, but overall I was re-experiencing the characters and conflict of Ruby, Oklahoma all over again through Morrison’s rapturous and at times punishing elliptical plot lines. Ruby was a small town built by nine families who migrated after they lost their previous home. Miles away from Ruby is a convent run by women who trade goods, desire, pleasure, and secrets with the families of Ruby, deeply rooted in tradition to the point of spoiling the soil with ignorance, and both territories' own futures. Cause it’s Morrison, history, colorism, violence are all present, but it’s the complexity in which she treats the idea of community, what we owe the ones we come from, how do we honor its past, when do we run from them, do we return, how do we hide and be present in them, that is so rich and multifaceted. It'd also about lying to others and ourselves. Morrison forever.