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Paradise Review

When Toni Morrison gets brought up in conversation, it’s usually about her books The Bluest Eye, Beloved, or Song of Solomon. But her entire eleven-book catalog is worth reading and rereading.  

Written after she had already been awarded a Pulitzer Prize as well as the Nobel Prize in Literature and had been cemented as one of America’s greatest writers, Paradise comes out swinging, and it has become one of my favorite works by Morrison.

Paradise tells the story of Ruby, a small, all-black town in Oklahoma, and the unorthodox convent of women who live several miles outside of it. Morrison explores the idea of "paradise," and how humans always end up drawing lines to exclude someone to create their definition of it. The town of Ruby has slackened the chains of racial oppression, but gender domination is just as powerful as ever, and the men of Ruby cannot stand to see a convent of untethered women so close to their ‘paradise.’  

Morrison explores the ideas of freedom, exclusion, and the divine feminine in this book, and it is worth a slow, steady read-through as Morrison’s beautiful words pour over and pierce you. I highly recommend this novel. 

Review by Andrew

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