God Help the Child
“Sly, savage, honest, and elegant…Morrison spikes elements of realism and hyperrealism with magic and mayhem, while sustaining a sexily poetic and intoxicating narrative atmosphere.”
Elle
The new novel from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison
Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child is a searing tale about the way childhood trauma shapes and misshapes the life of the adult. At the center is a woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love until she told a lie that ruined the life of an innocent woman, a lie whose reverberations refuse to diminish.
Booker is the man Bride loves and loses, whose core of anger was born in the wake of the childhood murder of his beloved brother.
Rain is the mysterious white child, who finds in Bride the only person she can talk to about the abuse she’s suffered at the hands of her prostitute mother.
Sweetness is Bride’s mother, who takes a lifetime to understand that “what you do to children matters. And they might never forget.”
Praise