Beloved KINDLE MOBI by Toni Morrison H.A.

Set during the Reconstruction era in 1873, Toni Morrison's Beloved centers on the powers of memory and history. Eighteen years earlier, Sethe had murdered an infant daughter in order to save her from a life of slavery. Morrison borrowed the event from the real story of Margaret Garner, who, like Sethe, escaped from slavery in Kentucky and murdered her child when slave catchers caught up with her in Ohio. Beloved straddles the line between fiction and history; from the experiences of a single family, Morrison creates a powerful commentary on the psychological and historical legacy of slavery.
A haunting (and haunted!) novel, and perhaps Morrison's best known work (it was made into a film starring Oprah Winfrey in 1998) Beloved recuperates a history that had been lost to the ravages of forced silences and willed forgetfulness. Morrison writes Sethe’s story with the voice of a people who historically have been denied the power of language.
There are numerous study guides on the internet if you are reading Beloved for academic reasons, but it is a "beloved" novel with popular audiences. Despite a heavy use of metaphor, a poetry of the language, and a narrative that teeters between both present and past tense, Beloved is an easy and at times, even enjoyable read, but also a very disturbing one. A woman who murders her own child is seen by any society as perhaps the worst type of criminal, but with Morrison's fine detail and sensetivity, the fury and violence underlying the narrative exonerates Sethe and brings the reader to an understanding of how the crime of slavery pushed both blacks and whites into an almost inescapable moral black hole from which America has yet to recover. (H-A)