Beloved by Toni Morrison

Book review.

Hey, Book Worms! 👶🔪

· 3/5 🍿🍿🍿

This is one of those books I felt like I should have made my way through a long time ago, so I decided that it was time to finally do it.

Seetha was born into slavery, and she tried to make her escape when she was 124 months pregnant. She was determined that no more of her children would be born into slavery, so that is why she decided that she was going to make a break for it before her current child was born. The problem was that she went into labor while she was on the run, because of course that is how it happened.

While on the run, she came across a young white woman who ended up helping her with her delivery . . . sort of. And it was not long after giving birth that this white woman baled on her, leaving her to make the rest of her journey on her own.

Eventually, she made it to somewhere that she was . . . “safe,” or as safe as she could be, being a black woman (especially during that time). She managed to get some work and a place to live, but eventually, a group of white men tracked her down, with the intent of taking her back into the South and to her master.

Not wanting her children to live the rest of their lives in slavery, she killed the child that she gave birth to while on the run (and tried to kill the two others that she had with her).

Years later, while living with another daughter that she had had (while free), a young woman comes to her house and starts living with her and her daughter. This young woman called herself “Beloved,” and it is not long before it is discovered that this young woman was actually the daughter that she had killed while she was a toddler, because ghost stories and guilt.

After some time, Beloved starts taking over Setha’s life, so that she loses her job, and she no longer wants to leave her bed. It becomes clear to the reader that despite doing what she had done for a reason that seemed to make sense (not wanting her daughter to go through what she had gone through while enslaved), she still felt guilty for what she had done.

For the most part, the people that lived near her treated her like an outcast and wanted nothing to do with her, so when things started getting hard for her, she did not have much of anyone to help her. She still had the daughter that had been born in freedom, but she could only do so much. And after a time, Beloved disappeared, and she was left to her own devices (for the most part).

This was a difficult read, because of the topic, but it was something that really should be discussed because of how important it is to talk about that time period and the things that happened then. I did not really care for the way that the story was told; instead of being linear, a lot of the story was told through flashbacks. Sometimes this way of telling a story works, but I did not really dig it that much with this book. I think I would have liked it a bit more if had been done linearly, but I am sure that its structure would have worked for other people.

And the way that people talk up this book so much, I think I was expecting something a bit different than what it actually was. if I had not been expecting something different, I think I might have liked it a bit more than I did, but that does not mean that it was not something that was well-written and important (or that I am not glad that I finally made my way through it).

GoodReads: Beloved