Reader response: Beloved

Reader Response: On Goodreads.com, There was basically two responses, one, they loved it and it was fantastic or, two, the story was good but the style that it was written in gives you a headache and makes it a waste of time. EX: “It's heavy handed with its message, which ultimately ruins some pretty spectacular imagery. It’s also just a giant pastiche of people who can actually write, which makes it just feel disjointed and annoying since it switches between standard narration and stream of consciousness and surrealism in intensely awkward ways. It's not even like that switching between different narrative structures is inherently bad, but this book definitely does it in the most ridiculously annoying way of any book I have ever read.” by user Harpal On Barnesandnoble.com, the novel has an overwhelmingly good review. Almost all the reviews can be summed up by an anonymous user,” I didn't find it confusing - but it was deep and required you to sit with it sometimes to absorb it - which also seemed to me, intentional by the writer. I loved that about it.” On Amazon.com, the reviews were almost identical to those on Goodreads. The novel was very well received and can be summed up by user MM when he states “If you can allow yourself to put yourself in the place of a slave, as is described in this book, you can feel the humiliation, grief, indignity, disgrace, fear, degradation and submissiveness that was a slave. Through Toni Morrison's words, I felt these feelings. I don't know how they survived. This is a hard book to read, but I'm glad I did. I believe we all need to understand what was done.” Personally, I would give this novel a 4/5. I agree that the story is fantastic and that it succeeds in it’s mission to show the audience how slavery has more than a physical effect on slaves, but is a very hard story to read. However, I do not believe that there was any better way of formating the story then how Morrison has already done.