One of the most profound books that I've ever read. The story of a mother and former slave suffering immeasurable trauma following the abolition of slavery in the US. It's so incredibly written in every aspect. Just about every character sees Sethe as insane, she is but it's caused by all of her trauma. She experienced so much loss, abandonment, dehumanization, and brutality from her oppressors. She was raised in a world where she wasn't allowed to cope, so how could she know how to cope with what that upbringing dealt her? She is a broken person that deserves to be mended more than any other character I know of. She doesn't deserve any of this, none of these characters do, but that's the lingering effects of slavery. You could say that all of the conflicts of this book were caused by Sethe herself, but that is a fundamental misunderstanding of the systems that caused thislong before the beginning of the story at the advent of the proto-fascist antebellum South.

favorite quotes:

She shook her head from side to side, resigned to her rebellious brain. Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can’t hold another bite?

Beloved begins as a slow-burning and haunting story about living on after the worst days, slowing winding around how to tell those days without shattering again.

The story rotates narrators and jumps back and forth in time in a way that was a little confusing at first, but the narrators have distinct voices and there’s mostly just Now and one big past event for each narrator as far as jumping around in time is concerned, so it became pretty easy to keep track of where the story was. The lack of demarcation with each switch helped to build the feeling that the past isn’t really gone for any of them. The story is about reckoning with the past in different ways, and how they deal with it. It’s also a ghost story, a haunting of the past refusing to leave. As the story develops it begins depicting the past events which were just hinted at earlier, circling back to them from different perspectives and catching slightly different bits of time surrounding a few very pivotal moments. It had the effect of helping me to ease into a very traumatic story.

The middle third of the book (leading up to the end of part 1) is absolutely devastating, enough story threads are in place for it to slowly wind to a set of riveting and horrifying explanations. This book is also filled with care, for the characters and the readers. The most brutal events are told from the perspective of someone who has already survived them (or who we know is around later on, at least), and that makes the current events feel manageable even when they’re differently awful. There are multiple narrators but it usually wasn’t hard to figure out whose perspective was in each section because their narrative styles were different enough to be distinct while having enough in common for the changes in POV to not be jarring.

I like the ending, it feels like it meets the characters at a place that makes sense for everything they've been through, both before the book began and during the main timeline. They're not all the way better, not by a long shot, but they're working on it, each in their own way.