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A Mercy
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In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
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No clue
- By Bree Breski on 01-27-19
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In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.
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The audio is not the same as the book
- By Rocio on 03-29-16
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God Help the Child
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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.
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You're a better human for listening
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Home
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Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. This is a deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and his home.
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Urbane
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Sula
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Two girls who grow up to become women...two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret.
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Good against evil and a riotous story to boot
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Love
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May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida, even L: all women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the center of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces: a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.
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Wonderful
- By Steve on 05-22-10
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Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
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No clue
- By Bree Breski on 01-27-19
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Jazz
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 3 hrs
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.
-
-
The audio is not the same as the book
- By Rocio on 03-29-16
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God Help the Child
- A Novel
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
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Story
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.
-
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You're a better human for listening
- By Aperio on 04-27-15
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Home
- A Novel
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. This is a deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and his home.
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Urbane
- By Kindle Customer on 08-11-12
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Sula
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Two girls who grow up to become women...two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret.
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-
Good against evil and a riotous story to boot
- By Karen on 04-11-11
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Love
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida, even L: all women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the center of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces: a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.
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Wonderful
- By Steve on 05-22-10
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Beloved
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but 18 years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
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Perhaps best read on paper
- By Cathy on 07-29-06
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Song of Solomon
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Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life, he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.
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Death United Them
- By Carol Binta Nadeem on 09-28-17
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Tar Baby
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Desiree Coleman
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Jadine Childs is a black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
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So good that I'm writing my first Audible review!
- By BL on 12-10-11
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The Bluest Eye
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It is the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
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Excellent but not an easy story.
- By MerryJovialL on 10-01-12
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Tar Baby
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Alfre Woodard
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Through a season of untroubled ease, the lives of five people move with a ritualized grace until, one night, a ragged, starving black American street man breaks into their house. And, in a single moment, with the perverse decision not to call for help but instead to invite the man to sit with them and eat, everything changes.
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I love Toni’s books!
- By Misty Maria Bonita on 11-15-17
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The Salt Roads
- By: Nalo Hopkinson
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 13 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
In 1804, shortly before the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue is renamed Haiti, a group of women gather to bury a stillborn baby. Led by a lesbian healer and midwife named Mer, the women's lamentations inadvertently release the dead infant's "unused vitality" to draw Ezili - the Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love - into the physical world. As Ezili explores her newfound powers, she travels across time and space to inhabit the midwife's body - as well as those of Jeanne, a mixed-race dancer and the mistress of Charles Baudelaire living in 1880s Paris, and Meritet.
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Difficult to convey
- By Paula P on 11-20-18
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The Source of Self-Regard
- Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
- By: Toni Morrison
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- Unabridged
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Story
Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection - a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.
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Barracoon
- The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
- By: Zora Neale Hurston
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
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Overall
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In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile.
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skip the introduction!
- By Earin on 10-16-18
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Everything Is Illuminated
- By: Jonathan Safran Foer
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- Unabridged
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Jonathan is a Jewish college student searching Europe for the one person he believes can explain his roots. Alex, a lover of all things American and unsurpassed butcher of the English language, is his lovable Ukrainian guide. On their quixotic quest, the two young men look for Augustine, a woman who might have saved Jonathan's grandfather from the Nazis. As past and present merge, hysterically funny moments collide with great tragedy, and an unforgettable story of one family's extraordinary history unfolds.
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What a brilliantly original work!
- By L. Berlyne-Kovler on 12-19-08
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
- By: Zora Neale Hurston
- Narrated by: Ruby Dee
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Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years.
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Ruby Dee is amazing
- By Jennifer on 04-20-13
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Invisible Man
- A Novel
- By: Ralph Ellison
- Narrated by: Joe Morton
- Length: 18 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of 20th-century African-American life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching - yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places.
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Masterfully written; perfectly narrated
- By Imhokhai on 03-04-13
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Taking the Arrow out of the Heart
- By: Alice Walker
- Narrated by: Alice Walker
- Length: 2 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Alice Walker shares a timely volume of nearly 70 works of passionate and powerful poetry that bears witness to our troubled times, while also chronicling a life well-lived. From poems of painful self-inquiry, to celebrating the simple beauty of baking frittatas, Walker offers us a window into her magical, at times difficult, and liberating world of activism, love, hope and, above all, gratitude. Whether she’s urging us to preserve an urban paradise or behold the delicate necessity of beauty to the spirit, Walker encourages us to honor the divine that lives inside all of us....
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Wonderful and Thank You
- By Judith G. on 10-21-18
Publisher's Summary
In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root.
Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, "with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady." Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who's spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens' mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.
A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
Acts of mercy may have unforeseen consequences.
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Overall
- Pablo Tebas
- 01-18-09
Great book
Magnificent book from Toni Morrison. A story about love and betrayal in the late 1600s. A story told from multiple points of view. Morrison uses stream of consciousness for most of the book, what reminds me of Faulkner and "The Sound and The Fury". Not an easy book to read because until you finish it you really do not get the whole story: literally until the very last sentence of the novel.
I think this book is easier to read that to listen to, because each chapter is narrated by one character, and in the audiobook version the separation between chapters is not clear. Toni Morrison has a wonderful evocative voice, but she does not try to change it for each character of the novel, relying only for identification of each of them on the different way they express themselves. The makes the audition confusing, at least initially. I ended up reading the book on paper at the same time that I was listening to Toni Morrison's voice, and then I was completely hooked on the book.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful
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Overall
- Suzn F
- Fletcher, VT, US
- 12-28-08
Oh, this book
Toni Morrison is one of my favorite authors. This story is stream of consciousness, poetry, beauty, horror, longing and sorrow. The characters have stayed with me. I was engaged and interested every moment. I truly loved this book.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful
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Overall
- Don M
- 12-01-09
Hard to follow as an audiobook
I suspect this may be easier to follow in print. The point of view changes constantly from one character to another without notice. After a few paragraphs I would realize it was a new person. Perhaps it is to depict the scattered nature of memory? I had to give it up. An audiobook needs a strong, clear narrative for me to follow.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful
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Overall
- Andre
- 02-19-09
Read the Book
This book keeps showing up on Top 10 lists...however, Morrison's reading reduces the audiobook to several hours of indistinctive blah-blah. Characters blur together. Paragraphs lack distinction. Why didn't someone do Ms Morrison a favor and tell her that she's not a gifted reader. (A writer, yes...a reader, no) Here's a case where I wish I had read the book.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful
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Overall
- Judith Seaboyer
- 11-23-08
Toni Morrison
What a gift to have Toni Morrison read her exquisite novel, and to have the pleasure of an interview in addition. How gracious she is as an interviewee, especially given how much of it she must have to do on book tours and so on.
Don't miss this! And even if you've read Beloved on the page, do consider listening to Morrison read that, too.
16 of 20 people found this review helpful
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Overall
- Jerry Ingersoll
- 04-06-09
Beautiful story, beautiful read
Thank you Toni Morrison for writing this heart-wrenching yet beautiful story of these oh so real people. I have now a deeper understanding of slavery, and of loyalty. I listened twice and loved your voice. This is now on my list of favorites.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
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Overall
- Elizabeth
- Washington, DC, USA
- 02-21-09
Exquisite
Toni Morrison's language is exquisite; her characters heart-wrenching and her theme of betrayal universal. The interview with Ms. Morrison that follows the book is fascinating as she describes her exhaustive reasearch and personal motivation to write A Mercy. This is a book that will stay with me, read by one the world's great authors.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
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Overall
- Tater
- 12-23-08
Listening was a challenge
Sorry, I love Toni Morrison's writing, and she has a lovely rich voice, but her pauses are as regular as a slow ticking clock no matter how long the sentence or how varied its structure. I found myself predicting each pause, which made listening to the story less than optimum, tedious, in fact. I have the same opinion of the spoken version of Beloved, one of my favorite books. Please, Ms. Morrison, your novels deserve professional readers.
7 of 9 people found this review helpful
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Overall
- Sara
- Rosemount, MN, United States
- 04-14-09
Hard to Follow!!
I listened to the first 90 minutes and had to stop, the narrator was so hard to follow she was very monitone and I just could not visualize the picture she was trying to portray.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful
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Overall
- Karen
- Vancouver, BC, Canada
- 03-11-09
BOOK GREAT, READING SO-SO
This is my new favourite Morrison novel. Compelling characters, deeply empathic engagement with each of those characters. Ample stylistic exploration without cutesy tricks. But Morrison's reading of her own novel is strangely sporadic, consisting of short phrases, disconnected. She sounds like she may have emphysema or something. Very distracting. Further, while her experessiveness, apart from the tic mentioned above, is fine, books narrated by actors capable of making the characters distinct work better in this medium.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful