Reviews with content warning for Fire/Fire injury - Gott, hilf dem Kind

So it's come down to this huh. My last Toni Morrison fiction. This is heartbreaking. I liked the book; it's heartbreaking I have no more novels! But it does mean I can reread them for the first time now!

It's not her best work, but it's not her worst either. A breeze to read as usual. It hooked me more towards the end, or more than halfway through the book, which isn't good while reading but the parts before that were pleasant enough I didn't look at the book negatively. I'm sure it wasn't her intention but it is a little sad she didn't go out with a bang. This book is fine. I love Black love, and that was her primary love through all her books in all its different forms. All her books are about love! 🫶🏾

Content Warnings

tayyy_mayyy's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

Content Warnings

mdavis26's review against another edition

Go to review page

3.75

Content Warnings

3littlewordz's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This is the final standalone novel (really a novella) from the beloved Toni Morrison, and I'm so glad I listened to this in Muva Morrison's voice!

I don't have the vocabulary to express how I felt reading this novel. No words were wasted at all, and I actually wish some storylines

(Where did Bride's father go? Could we go more into depth with Queen's background? Why was Sophia even in a position to be falsely accused?)

were further explored. Still, with less than 200 pages, Muva Morrison chose which storylines to illuminate very intently. I had to keep reminding myself that Bride was pretty young because most of her decisions made absolutely no sense to my late 30s mind. The themes of child sexual and emotional abuse were interwoven throughout the story - incredibly heartbreaking, but it was not gratuitous. My only drawback is the length of the story, but I will gladly listen to or read again!

Content Warnings

tianxiao's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

torts's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark reflective sad

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

I can't bring myself to give this less than five stars, but I also don't really want it grouped in with the rest of my five-star favorites because so much of it is hard to read. Enjoyable prose, poignant magic realism, insightful perspective-switches, but stomach-turning subject matter.

I wish I'd read this for a book club or a class or something, because the discussion questions from the end of the book were great. The ones I'm currently stewing on (with the original numbering retained so you'll get the scrambled-thoughts vibe as much as possible):

3. Kirkus Reviews said of the book, "As in the darkest fairy tales, there will be fire and death." In what other ways is God Help the Child like a fairy tale?
Horrible things happen to children. A woman is punished(?) by losing the beauty that had given her power, as her body gradually reverts to that of a child. (The reverting of her body is the topic of the next discussion question, but I'm not sure I've exactly landed on my answer to "what's going on there?" beyond some sort of atonement. She was attempting to assuage her own guilt with gifts for the woman she condemned and that kicks off the breakup/spiral, but when she helps Queen she's no longer being selfish or superficial and has broken through the walls between herself and Booker so they see each other more as people.) Names like Sweetness and Bride and Rain and Queen for the central women whose roles in one another's stories are something like archetypes.

5. Several of the primary characters have different names from the ones they received at birth: Bride, Sweetness, Rain. What do these new names tell us about the characters?
See archetype-y thoughts above. In fairy tales names have power, as does the withholding of names. In this story, though, the new names tend to tell us what those characters *aren't* rather than what they are. This list should probably include the man who tortured, molested, and murdered children and is repeatedly called "the nicest man in the world" rather than named.

8. Discuss Bride's friendship with Brooklyn. Over and over, Bride says how much she trusts Brooklyn, and what a good friend she is. What do these assertions tell us about Bride's character? Does it matter that Brooklyn is white, with dreadlocks?
Maybe it's foreshadowing about Brooklyn feeling entitled to take over Bride's position at work? But I think it mostly just points to her not being a great person, and says something about Bride being naive? Or at least incapable/uninterested when it comes to understanding other people?

12. The reader's understanding of Booker is shaped by Bride's recollection of his saying, "You not the woman I want," her limited insights about him, and Brooklyn's descriptions of him as a shady character. But in Part III we learn that he's quite different from what we've imagined. What point is Morrison making here?
See above. We should imagine other people complexly, and not reduce them to the moment they hurt us most or judge them by out-of-context actions to fit them into stereotypes.

13. Bride holds on to Booker's shaving brush, and Sofia keeps Bride's earring. Why are these totems important?
Trappings of adulthood? Thinking about them as totems seems important...

23. Nearly every main character has had a brush with child sexual abuse. What is the cumulative effect?
An undercurrent of despair? A resignation to the idea that the world is a brutal place? Something like the meme of the dog in the burning room going "this is fine" as he drinks his coffee, because at a certain point when a character's history gets revealed you're primed to respond with something like "of course."

24. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, Morrison said: "There is no such thing as race.... Racism is a construct, a social construct. And it has benefits. Money can be made off of it. People who don't like themselves can feel better because of it. It can describe certain kinds of behavior that are wrong or misleading. So [racism] has a social function. But race can only be defined as a human being." In the novel, Booker says similar things. Sweetness raised Bride the way she did because of Bride's dark skin. How does this all tie together?
"His words were rational and, at the time, soothing but had little to do with day-to-day experience--like sitting in a car under the stunned gaze of little white children who couldn't be more fascinated if they were at a museum of dinosaurs." Bride's response to Booker's words turn this quote from Morrison into more of a dialogue within the book. The entire novel is a demonstration of how race can be performed (in Bride's adopting her all-white wardrobe to turn the dark skin that made her father leave and her mother withhold love into an asset in a capitalist society that will fetishize the beautiful and the "exotic") and where race-as-a-social-construct is true and potentially comforting, but ultimately irrelevant to the (brutal) lived experiences that are shaped by the social function of racism.

Content Warnings

theoreads's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging reflective

Content Warnings

More...