At its center--a friendship between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel--both black, both smart, both poor, raised in a small Ohio town--meet when they are twelve, wishbone thin and dreaming of princes.

Through their girlhood years they share everything--perceptions, judgments, yearnings, secrets, even crime--until Sula gets out, out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where beneath the sporting life of the men hanging around the place in headrags and soft felt hats there hides a fierce resentment at failed crops, lost jobs, thieving insurance men, bug-ridden flour...at the invisible line that cannot be overstepped.

Sula leaps it and roams the cities of America for ten years. Then she returns to the town, to her friend. But Nel is a wife now, settled with her man and her three children. She belongs. She accommodates to the Bottom, where you avoid the hand of God by getting in it, by staying upright, helping out at church suppers, asking after folks--where you deal with evil by surviving it.

Not Sula. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, she can never accommodate. Nel can't understand her any more, and the others never did. Sula scares them. Mention her now, and they recall that she put her grandma in an old folks' home (the old lady who let a train take her leg for the insurance)...that a child drowned in the river years ago...that there was a plague of robins when she first returned...

What a wonderfully strange book! Entertaining, but different!

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A Book Relay sent to redjanet in the United Kingdom! Enjoy!

I received this yesterday in the post. Thanks!

I started reading this thinking that I may have read it years ago but had forgotten what it was about and what it was like. If that is the case then it is understandable as there wasn't really that much about this book that I liked. I've read quite a few books by Toni Morrison, most of which I either love or like and I found this one quite disappointing and lacking in the richness of plot that so many other books by her have.

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Posted as part of a relay.

Received today in the mail. I've seen this title numerous times and have almost bought it a number of times as well. Thanks for sending! Will read soon.

I would have to agree with redjanet on her opinion on this one. I am a Toni Morrison fan, but I felt this book did not do justice to her talents. I felt it really lacked richness in the plot as well, and I definitely wouldn't recommend this title to those wanting to give this author a try. Regardless, thanks for sharing! I will pass it on.

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Sending off to glory-to-glory. Enjoy!

The text is so large this looks like a teen book. I may release it at a hurricane shelter or school.

Thank you!

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The FBC, Hazlehurst, is our county's official Red Cross Shelter. I'll be donating this book with some other items.