Morrison's eleventh and final novel — her first set in the present day — opens with a mother's refusal: Sweetness, a light-skinned woman, gives birth to a daughter so dark she is frightened of her, and raises Lula Ann in withheld affection she tells herself is armor. Lula Ann grows up to rename herself Bride and to build a cosmetics career on the very blackness her mother taught her to hide, but the childhood lie she once told — testimony that sent an innocent teacher to prison — is still working in her, and so is the damage in Booker, the lover who walks out on her, and in Rain, the abused white child she takes in. The novel's refrain is its warning: what you do to children matters, and they might never forget.
Author: Toni Morrison · Original publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 2015
