After looking into all the reviews of Beloved, I realized that the book was fairly popular between everyone who read it and one of the only reasons people didn’t like it was due to the difficulty level it had. The book was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, which shows that the novel was an outstanding piece of work.
While reading through reviews on Goodreads, I found that people who read this book either hated it or loved it- no in between. The average rating of the novel on this website is a 3.76 out of 5 stars. There was a variety of comments on the book, but most people liked how Morrison wrote an “American Horror Novel” that showed the horrors of American slavery. One of the commenters who gave it five stars stated, “To me, great horror has the scary element (e.g., a ghost) and then, lurking behind it, something so vast and evil that trying to think about it can make you go insane. Beloved did that!” I agree that Morrison did an excellent job writing a book that could give any readers goosebumps from fear of what the slaves had to go through. Most of the people who left one or two-star ratings felt that it was hard to read or just didn’t like the whole story line of the novel, which I believe is only partially true- the book was hard to read, but the story behind it was still magnificent.
While looking at the reviews on Barnes and Noble, I found the average was 4 out of 5 stars. This website had a large of a variety of ratings. Someone who left a four-star rating stated, “Morrison's brilliant masterpiece transposes the mind of the reader into the time of the Civil War, where escaped slaves are continuously disturbed by their precedent.” This comment is the perfect way to describe the book, I think it’s amazing how Morrison wrote a story about a haunting in slavery but put a bigger picture behind all of it. Just like on Goodreads, the people who didn’t like Beloved felt it was too difficult to read.
The reviews on Amazon were the most supportive, the average rating was 4.1 out of 5 stars. This is the highest out of all three websites, the comments I found were more positive than anything. The first review that I read stated, “A truly great book. Its message resonates louder now than ever.” This person had left a five-star rating and also said the story was outstanding because of it wasn’t just about their suffering, but about persevering through the insufferable. This evaluation of the novel goes right along with the trend of other reviews, most people felt that no other author could write such a jaw-dropping story using the “magical realism” that she did.
Overall, I agreed with almost all the comments about Beloved and I would personally give it a four-star review only because of how difficult it was to follow at some points. Besides the difficulty of reading it, the ultimate lesson behind the words on the pages was unyielding, and I enjoyed reading the novel. When comparing Beloved and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I think Beloved had more positive reviews between all the sites.
Work Cited:
Morrison, Toni. "Beloved." Goodreads. Web. 6 May 2017.
Morrison, Toni. "Beloved." Barnes & Noble. Web. 6 May 2017.
"Customer Reviews." Amazon. Web. 6 May 2017.
It's interesting to hear that different readers viewed Beloved as an American horror novel. Typically, when I think of a horror story Stephen King's novel come to mind. However, he fiction describes more a contemporary horror. Morrison manages to explore a historical period of slavery in America and capture the horror story it was. I never would have associated the novel with the horror genre, but now I definitely realize how it could be considered a horror story.
ReplyDelete