I really liked how the characters were written. I also liked how the story was proceeding the same way the years were.
However, the story lost me once Sula died. I didn't really care that much about the townspeople and how they reacted. Also going back to Eva and Nel was not really needed for me. The biggest meh for me was when Shadrack retold what happend between him and Sula the day chicken little died. It made me feel like the story played with my sympathy earlier on because I felt truly awful for Sula. Why would they make her go back dismantled and without her belt when there wasn't something truly disgusting happening behind closed door? In general, how every chapter had to end with something shocking got pretty old.
Some interesting things in the last couple of chapters. I particularly found it interesting that people were behaving a certain way to position themselves against Sula, and after she died they didn't have anyone to contrast their behaviour to so they went back to behaving how they had before she came back. This is a thought-provoking perspective on why people behave the way they do. Is it just so they can tell themselves they're better than those who don't do the "right thing"?
Of all the Morrison I've read, this one felt the least coherent. I had a hard time putting all the pieces together in a single whole. Why have Eva burn her son to death? How does this help us make sense of the relationship between Sula and Nel? Or is it more about the themes of family and community that underpin the book, and less about the girls themselves?
The last thing I'll say is there was some interesting reflection in the last chapter about what makes a "place." In academic literature, a "place" is a physical place, of course, but also one that is imbued with meaning and connections. When we talk about "placemaking" we ask how we build spaces that people can then move through, build memories in, come to care for and feel like they are connected to. So when Nel reflects on the Bottom no longer being a place, it made me think of how the passing of time in this book has asserted kind of the opposite of a placemaking force on the Bottom, as people have drifted away from it, forgotten things about it, or become less emotionally invested in or connected to it. So that gave me something to think about!
I feel like this book had a lot to say in less than 200 pages but was a little bit muddled in how it did say it. There are definitely some unanswered questions from certain events in the book but my main takeaway is that this is about societal expectations and how these are both formed and enforced. Sula was constantly going against them which people really did not like, but then without her to prove that something was 'bad' the people in Medallion/the Bottom all became complicit themselves in doing things that they previously were against. The commentary on perspectives and memory was interesting too, and how certain events can be thought of differently, and then remembered differently again over time. Events that can seem innocent can then be reframed to be worse and vice versa. I think this was a frustrating but worthwhile read so for that I'm going with 3.5 ⭐.