Sula | 
| Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $13.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 3870
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.5
ISBN: 1400033438
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781400033430
ASIN: 1400033438
Publication Date: June 8, 2004
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Condition: This book has writing and/or highlighting - in some cases a lot, sometimes just a few pages* If you can deal with the writing/markings, this is a great deal! * If this does not have writing and highlighting, it is probably a former library book * We carefully inspected this * Great customer service * Satisfaction Guaranteed!
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Product Description
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. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 what was the point? May 25, 2008
I was extremely disappointed in SULA, I had to force myself to read the entire book. I found it to be very boring.
Terribly disappointed!! January 24, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have read a lot of books, but this has to be one of the worst that I have ever read! I found it to be terribly slow and very hard to get interested in, not to mention that there are several parts that are downright offensive. Don't waste your time, there is much better reading out there!
 Easy going horror January 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Toni Morrison writes so well it just flows out, but the horror it leads to is both disturbing and unexpected.
 Sexy Sula Seduces You and Those Around Her [160][78] December 1, 2007
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Morrison's writing style is unique and demanding - and most readers like it like that.
"Sula" is a simple story about complicated people which Morrison paints in terribly artful language. It is drama, it is insightful prose, and it is a great reading novel.
Bad versus good are the constant theme. Sula is theoretically bad. And, the starched personalities of the town in which they live, Medallion, are the good. But, at the very end, Sula's once best friend has an epiphany and seems to recognize that Sula is not bad, and that other's perceptions of her were wrong, terribly wrong. But, Sula is selfish. Most of the others are anything but. And, that divide creates many of the problems, and more.
Selfishness includes getting something others cannot obtain. Sula gets an education. Sula gets to travel. Sula gets her grandmother's money and does not need to work. Sula gets her grandmother's home - large. Her life is easy. She has it all. And, the others cannot see her doing anything constructive with it. And they are right. In fact, she can be outright destructive - but not necessarily by ill will. She is just too self absorbed.
Each chapter commences with a year - indicating the calendar year of the growth of the girls - Sula and Nel, Sula's best friend who later has the inconceivable violation by Sula separate them for the rest of their lives. Before their 1910 birth, we learn something about their respective parents and Sula's maniacal grandmother. And, along the way Medallion's other "far out" characters like Shadrack (whose eccentric January 3 annual suicide celebration reminds me of the strange idiosyncracies displayed by people of John Berendt's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"(Modern Library)).
But, as you turn pages of this book, you learn these uncommon people in the common town of Medallion are people you would love to learn and learn to love. People like these characters are the bedrock of America.
Like Morrison's novels, this book includes more eye-opening accounts of the white man's cruelty to man with behavior that people today find hard to believe was countenanced by our forefathers. For example: trains had no bathrooms for blacks so they had to run to fields at certain stops and use leaves for paper; no blacks of Medallion were hired for construction which was located at their town; black people who ran through white cars would be threatened to be "red lighted" by conductors; black men would be arrested and beaten for matters which caused white women to commit torts upon other white women (car accident caused by jaywalker); and a drowned boy who floated down river would not be returned for three days because whites would not carry his corpse back the two miles until a ferry was available.
Depressing is something which is not uncommon in Morrison's novels, but being black in the wrong time in America's history may be more the cause of this result than Morrison's style or focus. And, the topics she addresses are serious topics which deserve to be aired, deserve to be read, and are honored to be written about by someone of her literary acclaim.
This is a very good book by a Nobel laureate - it is a must read.
"As willing to feel pain as to give pain, to feel pleasure as to give pleasure, hers was an experimental life." November 11, 2007
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
Written in 1973, Toni Morrison's second novel explores themes of life, love, sex, and death, contrasting Sula Peace and Nel Wright, best friends from childhood who grow up to lead totally different adult lives. Living in the Bottom, an ironically named, poverty-stricken black community in the hills of Medallion, Ohio, Sula and Nel, opposites in personality, share their thoughts, feelings, and secrets, some of them of life-and-death importance. Part of a family with a long history of violence, Sula believes she owes nothing to anyone except herself, while Nel's strict mother imposes limits and insists on her adherence to social values.
Though Sula eventually escapes the Bottom in the 1920s to attend college and travel from Georgia to California, Michigan to Louisiana, she always does what is expedient, having no real values or ambitions, other than her own pleasure. When Sula returns to the Bottom in 1937, the stable Nel is a wife and mother trying to keep her family fed and clothed, a woman who no longer has anything in common with Sula, though she becomes Sula's innocent victim. Morrison develops Sula's character through her dysfunctional relationships and selfish actions, showing her connections to her family's past but never blaming it for her later abhorrent behavior.
The novel is a series of cycles and follows a circular structure, opening in 1965, as whites decide they want the Bottom land for golf courses and hilltop views and the blacks who have always lived there move to the valley with its more fertile land. The cyclical nature of life is also borne out in the lives of the characters, especially that of Sula, who escapes Bottom but returns inevitably to the community of her mother and grandmother. Racial segregation, accepted as a given, underlies all facets of the novel, but Morrison focuses on character here, avoiding polemics and creating a novel which manages to be tough but often darkly humorous, emotionally sensitive but often brutal, compassionate but realistic about human nature.
Rich with imagery and symbolism, the novel is also accessible and involving. Morrison creates characters with whom the reader identifies, even in Sula, who is a less than sympathetic protagonist; Shadrack, the shell-shocked war veteran who opens and closes the novel, wrings the heart even as he lives a life of absurdity. Filled with irony, intricate in structure, and well-developed in its themes, Sula is less complex than some of Morrison's later novels, but satisfying in its vividly drawn view of a struggling black community unified in its poverty. n Mary Whipple
Song of Solomon
Beloved
JazzThe Fiction Of Toni Morrison: Reading and Writing on Race, Culture, and IdentityConversations With Toni Morrison (Literary Conversations Series)
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