Sula (Oprah's Book Club) (Paperback)

~ Toni Morrison (Author) "In that place, where they tore the nightshade and black-berry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was..." (more)
Key Phrases: Tar Baby, Carpenter's Road, Chicken Little (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Sula, Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, tells the story of two women--friends since childhood, separated in young adulthood, and reunited as grown women. Nel Wright grows up to become a wife and mother, happy to remain in her hometown of Medallion, Ohio. Sula Peace leaves Medallion to experience college, men, and life in the big city, an exceptional choice for a black woman to make in the late 1920s.

As girls, Nel and Sula are the best of friends, only children who find in each other a kindred spirit to share in each girl's loneliness and imagination. When they meet again as adults, it's clear that Nel has chosen a life of acceptance and accommodation, while Sula must fight to defend her seemingly unconventional choices and beliefs. But regardless of the physical and emotional distance that threatens this extraordinary friendship, the bond between the women remains unbreakable: "Her old friend had come home.... Sula, whose past she had lived through and with whom the present was a constant sharing of perceptions. Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself."

Lyrical and gripping, Sula is an honest look at the power of friendship amid a backdrop of family, love, race, and the human condition. --Gisele Toueg

Review

“Extravagantly beautiful. . . . Enormously, achingly alive. . . . A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter.” —The New York Times

“Exemplary. . . . The essential mysteries of death and sex, friendship and poverty are expressed with rare economy.” —Newsweek

“In characters like Sula, Toni Morrison’s originality and power emerge.” —The Nation

“Enchanting. . . . Powerful.” —Chicago Daily News

“Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature.” —The New York Review of Books

“Sula is one of the most beautifully written, sustained works of fiction I have read in some time. . . . [Morrison] is a major talent.” —Elliot Anderson, Chicago Tribune

“As mournful as a spiritual and as angry as a clenched fist . . . written in language so pure and resonant that it makes you ache.” —Playboy

“In the first ranks of our living novelists.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Toni Morrison’s gifts are rare: the re-creation of the black experience in America with both artistry and authenticity.” —Library Journal

“Should be read and passed around by book-lovers everywhere.” —Los Angeles Free Press



From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Plume; Oprah edition (April 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452283868
• ISBN-13: 978-0452283862
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (132 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #452,430 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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• This is item 46 in The Oprah's Book Club Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Difficult, but Well Worth It, April 5, 2002

By A Customer

I think Toni Morrison is America's greatest living author. Perhaps she is the greatest living woman author. Surely she is in the top three. Although "Sula" isn't my favorite Morrison work, I think it is one of Morrison's most complicated and one of her richest. Those who read Morrison must remember she is a classicist and approach her as such. Not to do so only creates needless problems for the reader and Morrison can be difficult to read, though always enjoyable and always superb.

On it's surface, "Sula" is the story of two black women who remain lifelong friends despite their obvious differences and the different way in which each pursues her life. Set in an Ohio community called, The Bottom, "Sula" follows these two women, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, from childhood to marriage to old age to death.

Nel is the conformist in this oddly matched pair. She marries and raises a family in the place of her birth. Outwardly, at least, she seems to need no more than husband and children and community to make her happy. She adapts. Sula, on the other hand, is a far different story.

Sula is a woman who feels the need to escape, to break free of whatever binds her. And, if her breaking free involves pain...for herself or for others, then so be it. She moves from The Bottom, goes to college and becomes the epitome of everything that Nel is not...in short, Sula becomes a waton seductress. For Sula, hell is stability; for Nel, hell is change.

Is either woman happy with her choices in life? No, not entirely, and we do find echoes of Nel in Sula and echoes of Sula in Nel. Though it's not obvious at first glance, the women are really two sides of the same coin. One came up "heads," the other, "tails." Both women are, however, black Americans and both are proud to be black Americans. It is how they express their heritage, and their love for each other, that differs.

Morrison is a masterful writer and her handling of the character of Sula is miraculous. We could have so easily come to hate this wanton women, we could have so easily come to have seen her as the stereotypical seductress, the temptress, the tramp. Yet Morrison manages, somehow, to endow Sula with a humanity and a beauty that shines through all her artifice and pain.

For me, "Sula" is a book about choices and the problems of living with those choices. It is about loving someone who chooses a very different path in life than we do and what is needed to keep that love alive...or even if it can be kept alive. Sula and Nel are both beautiful characters and both are vibrantly alive. Both want desperately to hold onto their love for each other, but fate and circumstances make it increasingly difficult. The story of Sula's and Nel's growth from child to adult to old age is the thread that ties the other stories in this book into one seamless whole.

Although "Sula" could be seen as an allegory or metaphor for the rediscovery of the core self of black America, I feel the characters, themselves are too rich, to fully-drawn, to alive, to call this book an allegory. Perhaps on some level, it is, but Morrison is a writer of literature, not genre fiction.

All of Toni Morrison's books are masterpieces and all can be read on many levels. "Sula" is no exception. It is a difficult book but one that is both beautiful and tragic and worth every second any reader spends with it. I really can't recommend "Sula," or any other Morrison book, highly enough.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A powerful story of friendship..., July 26, 2002

By	Dianna Johnston "Compulsive Reader" (Joplin, MO) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Another Toni Morrison under my belt and proud of it! I've always heard that her novels are difficult reads, but after completing (and enjoying) the two that I've read, I'm going to disagree with that statement. Toni has a way with words that make even the most mundane of statements seem eloquent and rhythmic.

Sula tells the story of a small black community called The Bottom located in Medallion, Ohio and its many colorful citizens. We have Shadrack, who, after returning from the war, has spent every January 3 celebrating a holiday of his own making, National Suicide Day. There is Eva Peace, the one-legged grandmother; Hannah, Eva's daughter, who shares her bed with her friends' and neighbors' husbands; and Sula, Hannah's daughter, who shares her mother's wild spirit and befriends her complete opposite, the calm and mature, Nel Wright. This novel tells mostly about the friendship of Sula and Nel and how their lives take different paths as they grow older. However, there is some very powerful writing with the background characters that shock and surprise the reader.

Sula is set in the early 1900s and spans 40 years or so. I truly enjoyed this novel and am very glad I read it. Granted, there are parts of this story that wax poetically and go totally over my head, but for the most part I understood what I was reading and was continually immersed in the lives of The Bottom citizens. After my second successful attempt at a Toni Morrison novel (the first being The Bluest Eye), I'd be more than happy to try another one. So far so good.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ooooohhh suuuula, December 13, 2002

By A Customer

This is a generalization, but for most people, the movie scenes that cause us to cover our eyes are the same ones that make us inclined to keep watching the film. These same kind of passages are found continuously throughout Toni Morrison's Sula. Sula holds the same intensity and drama of a romance novel yet is written with the shocking talent of a Nobel Prize winning piece of literature. It is grotesquely beautiful and painfully honest, exploring the individual and mutual identity of two young black women growing up in the Midwest.
Morrison traces the lives of Sula and Nel , who are inseparable through childhood, barely able to distinguish themselves from each other. Their friendship is indestructible, until they suddenly take drastically different paths-Nel a path of small town domesticity, while Sula takes off to a wild life of college and city experiences. When Sula returns, they struggle to keep a friendship together despite their changed ways and lifestyles, deciding what is important to them-what is unforgivable and what can be overlooked.
This book is amazing, and worth reading simply for the beautiful writing, although the storyline does add to the appeal. It makes you question your own values-ideas of what is right and what is wrong, who is good and who is bad. It becomes clear through reading this that it is a fine line between these things, and that sometimes friendship is more important than morals.