God Help the Child

In Toni Morrison’s latest, Bride is a young woman grappling with how her past has shaped her present. Although the novel is shy of 200 pages, Morrison’s cutting prose gives it the same emotional weight that has made her one of the most important writers in the American canon. Recommended By Ashleigh B., Powells.com

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 fiery and provocative novel, God Help the Child — the first book 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.

“We have stepped into, once again, another of Morrison’s fertile landscapes. . . . It is a blessing that she still speaks with such salvific force and poetic grace.” The Plain Dealer

“Morrison gives us an unflinching look at the wounds that adults can inflict on children with life-altering consequences. . . . Few authors can deliver exquisitely written prose as Morrison.” Essence.com

“There is a new urgency to Morrison’s work, a desire to tell the story itself, without embellishment or ornamentation. . . . Morrison [is] the undisputed interpreter of the American black experience.” The Boston Globe

“A tragicomic jazz opera played out in four parts. . . . Morrison makes art from the cadences of human heartbreak.” The Atlantic

“Powerful. . . . A tale that is as forceful as it is affecting, as fierce as it is resonant.” Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Toni Morrison is the author of ten previous novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to Home (2012). She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in New York.