The Color Purple

Book: The Color Purple
Pages: 295
Challenges:
**Winter Reading challenge
** Decades Challenge (1980's)

First Sentence: "You better not never tell nobody but God."

Last Sentence: "Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt"

This book has been on my to-be-read list for a very long time. It was not an easy book to read-both in style and in subject matter, but is one I am glad I can say I have read. The book is about Celie and the terrible, seemingly hopeless life she has led. The bulk of the book is a series of letters written to God by Celie about her lonely hard life. About 1/2 way through the book hope is beginning to creep into her life via a new person introduced into her life. The last chapter is a kleenex chapter, but so worth wading through the sadness to get to.


From Amazon:
"The Color Purple" is one of the strongest statements of how love transforms and cruelty disfigures the human spirit that this reviewer has ever read. Alice Walker gives us Celie, 14 years old when the book opens, who has been raped, abused, degraded and twice impregnated by her father. After he takes her children away from her without a so much as a word, he marries her off like a piece of chattel to her husband, who is so cold, distant and inhuman to her that she can only refer to him as Mr; and this person deprives her of her sister Nettie, the only one who ever loved her.

Celie manages to survive by living one day at a time. Her life is a series of flat, lifeless panoramas painted in browns and grays. Into this existence, if you can call it that, comes Shug Avery, her husband's mistress, who shows Celie her own specialness and uniqueness."