I had a hard time starting this book because I had never read a Toni Morrison book before, and so I had to get used to the writing style. But once I got used to it, it felt like I was hungry for more and more of the story, I felt like I was entranced by the story and needed to know what would happen next. 
The characters are interesting and complex and they feel so close yet so out of reach— possibly mimicking how the characters themselves feel so close and yet so far from the people around them; lonely. I loved that Morrison keeps you on your toes, never fully revealing the events of the past until the end, carefully showing you glimpses and flashes and then keeping them hidden away, just as the characters do.
This book has made me a fan of Morrison’s writing and I definitely need to read more of hers. It’s so poetic and descriptive I can picture everything exactly as she tells it. 

This was intense, horrifying and beautiful. It is necessary reading on the evils of American slavery, and the uncertain period following emancipation, soaked in trauma and violence.

Toni Morrison wraps history with something unearthly, and has this amazing way of grounding you, and fighting your sense of reality on the next page. 

Stream-of-consciousness writing has always been difficult for me, so "Beloved" was challenging, sometimes a few pages in a sitting. If you have trouble with this, as well as indiscriminate POVs, I understand why it's not for you. But the magical, unique storytelling and the haunting, brave characters are well worth the read.

Absolutely devastating. I keep re-reading the last two pages. 

This book was difficult to come into blind--I didn't realize there would be elements of magical realism and the supernatural until maybe too far in because this book is challenging to follow. The time jumps and multiple planes of reality it takes place in is something that would change the way I were to read it a second time, which I feel I may have to. It took me a month to read because I couldn't read it unless I was in the mood to WORK for it--it’s quite dense. That's personal, though, because this book is objectively unique and important and uncomfortable. I mean, Toni Morrison doesn't have a Nobel and a Pulitzer for nothing. By blending the supernatural and the real life horrors of American slavery, this book is genuinely scary. 

Something that I couldn't stop thinking about is:

who can kill their children?

What I mean is,

maternal filicide/infanticide

is widely regarded as one of the worst crimes a parent can commit, to the extent that if this takes place you know that something is so, so, wrong. There's an element of gender here; it's worse when a mother does this, because it's expected that she selflessly love her children in a way that is not expected of fathers. I was thinking about the vilification of Medea for her crime, and how she is regarded as evil for killing her children in revenge for Jason leaving her. She knows it's wrong, and she knows she's guilty. This is clearly morally reprehensible. I also think of the graphic novel Maus, where the clearest detail in my mind from this book 10 years later is the mother poisoning her children in their sleep before they are sent to the gas chamber. This is convoluted, done so that her children don't die in a worse, torturous way, morally justifiable imo, a crime committed out of love and desperation. Sethe

murders her children (or child? still not clear what happened to her sons) in an extremely graphic and violent way

to save them from enslavement, from being sold and seperated and

whipped and raped like she was

. So in a way, she saves the child, and demonstrates her love in a very twisted way. And, the white slaveowner suffers for this act. Sethe's guilt isn't obvious at first, as she seems to function well in her daily life. Yes, her living child suffers and yearns for a connection with her mother, but she is not neglected and knows her mom loves her. But by the end of the novel Sethe is haunted, literally and metaphorically,

ending up in the same bed Baby Suggs laid in desperate for color.

Because of the time jumps back and forth and the way that information is only slowly revealed as the book progress, by the time you realize this is the event that splits the book into kind of a "before" and "after" everything clicks into place.

I want to talk about how uncomfortable it is to read this book. You cannot forget the dehumanization that must occur for slavery to take place--the characters are compared to animals, discussed in terms of their "worth" and "price", they're bought and can be sold at any time. And the discussion of beastality adds to this as well... Because I do think that this is a book that Americans need to read, as we should all be uncomfortable reading about slavery. A lot of the hate this book gets seems to stem from white people feeling personally attacked. No! Please be think critically! There are multiple truths in a well-written book, including this one, and "all whites bad" is NOT the message Morrison is conveying. 

I also thought about the idea of a "good" slaveowner versus a "bad" one. At Sweet Home--not sweet, not home--the families are not seperated, the wife seems to be... not the worst person in the world? and gifts Sethe earrings. Still, Halle works nonstop for years to buy his mother from her. This is juxtaposed with the preacher that takes over, who uses force violent on a pregnant woman, who has a talk with the

boys that rape her

because, essentially, "you can't treat animals like that if you want them to behave". However... "good" and "owner" cannot coexist; one cannot ethically "own" other humans. And this still provided the context for which the events of the book could happen, which again, reads like a horror novel. So I don't know, I thought the atypical representation of a plantation might mean something. 

It's an unresolved ending. I didn't like it. But I also can't see it being another way. 

Themes:
Memory and being haunted by the past (Rememory)
Collective memory 
Slavery --> concequences, the inherent brutality, loss of identity/dehumanization it causes,  
Perseverance
Understanding and coming to terms with the past (for the character and reader)

Quotes:
"'For a baby she throws a powerful spell', said Denver. 
'No more powerful than the way I loved her', Seth answered."
"Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her—remembering the wonderful souring trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that." 
"What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children." 
"I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not." 
"To Sethe, the future was a manner of keeping the past at bay." 
"For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd still have a little love over for the next one." 
"Clever, but the school teacher beat him anyways to show him that definitions belong to the definers— never the defined." 
"Shackled, walking through the perfume things honeybees love, Paul D hears the men talking and for the first time learns his worth. He has always known, or believed he did, his value— as a hand, a labor who can make profit on a farm— but now he discovers his worth, which is to say he learns his price. The dollar value of his weight, his strength, his heart, his brain, his penis, and his future."

"That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just to work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up."

"And in all those escapes he could not helping astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his. He hid in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and try not to love it. On nights when the sky was personal, weak with the weight of its own stars, he made himself not love it. It's graveyards and low-lying rivers. Or maybe just a house— solitary under a chinaberry tree; maybe a mule tethered and the light hitting its hide just so. Anything could stir him and he tried hard not to love it." (makes me think of the idea of a homeland in a diaspora)

"She was my best thing."

"This is not a story to pass on."

Oh. My. God.  Beloved is a heartbreaking, poignant, horrific view into the shameful legacy of slavery in the United States. Written like poetry and haunting in every way, I took my time with this book. I wish I read it with a book club so we could dissect passages together so I would recommend at least reading this with a buddy. Sometimes it was so dark it was difficult to read (the iron bit, among many other things, is so upsetting - I had no idea this was a thing) but I’m so glad I did. A must read for Americans. This book deals with themes of generational trauma, collective and individual pain, living in the past, being unable to move forward, and the power of community healing and support all wrapped up in a bit of a ghost story. I will absolutely read Morrison’s other works now. She has such a unique writing style and voice! It is easy to see why this is a classic.

I understand why this book was written and why it is considered so impactful. However, it was far too intense for me to read. The themes are not what I want to read for now, though they are important to discuss. 

Although Toni Morrison is undoubtedly one of the best American writers to have ever lived, her material is too dark and sad for my sensitive heart 😔. I really don’t want to conjure mental images of rape and murder :/