Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child—the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment—weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult.
At the center: a young 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. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally, Bride’s mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that “what you do to children matters. And they might never forget.”
A fierce and provocative novel that adds a new dimension to the matchless oeuvre of Toni Morrison.
From the Hardcover edition.
An Amazon Best Book of April 2015: “What you do to children matters…” This foreboding phrase informs the latest masterful novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. The story, at its heart, is about the devastating consequences of a light-skinned mother who rejects her dark-skinned child. Bride, the daughter, goes on to become a successful cosmetics mogul, but that success doesn’t translate to her personal life–Her inability to heal from childhood wounds stunts (even literally) her growth. Anyone familiar with Morrison’s oeuvre knows that she isn’t shy about lingering uncomfortably long in the bleakest of places, and at times the weight of this slender book seems almost too much to bear. But where there is darkness there is light, at least in Bride’s case, and this contrast serves to make her attempts at reshaping her destiny that much sweeter. And that is one of the most important and empowering lessons of God Help the Child–that the sins of others need not define you, that what is done to children indeed matters. But how children—so vulnerable and yet so resilient–can overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles matters all the more. –Erin Kodicek
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