Sula

By Toni Morrison

Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom—a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma’s girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a lifetime—until, decades later, as the girls become women, Sula’s anarchy leads to a betrayal that may be beyond forgiveness. 

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Masterful, richly textured, bittersweet, and vital, Sula is a modern masterpiece about love and kinship, about living in an America birthed from slavery. Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison gives life to characters who struggle with what society tells them to be, and the love they long for and crave as Black women. Most of all, they ask: When can we let go? What must we hold back? And just how much can be shared in a friendship?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 24, 2007
• ISBN: 9780307388131

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) was a Nobel Prize–winning American author, editor, and professor. Her contributions to the modern canon are numerous. Some of her acclaimed titles include: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. She won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Reviews for Sula

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sula by Toni Morrison is complex story set in an African-American community in Ohio between 1919 and 1965. It follows two best girlfriends from childhood through to old age and portrays one woman’s betrayal of the other. Nel Wright and Sula Peace, meet as children and their devotion to each other is strong enough to allow them to stand up to bullies and conceal a horrible secret. While Nel grows up to be a pillar of the community, Sula becomes a pariah. The author uses comedy, ribaldry, and sincerity to great effect and this story fully captured my attention.Toni Morrison has a powerful voice and the gritty language and exploration of family and friendship that Sula explores also captures the complexities of race and gender relations in the United States between the years of 1920 to 1965. I would classify Sula as a feminist novel, as the author uses powerful female characters to tell her story. The characters are realistic and humanizes a part of American history in this short but powerful novel. This is both Toni Morrison’s second novel and the second book by her that I have read. I am in awe of her frank, uncompromising and intense writing. Talented and impressive, I will continue to search out this author’s books.

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In this novel Morrison focuses on two characters: Nel, who is brought up by a very strict mother, and Sula, brought up in a large and busy household by her mother, grandmother, aunt, and various boarders/fosters. When they meet at school, they become fast friends. They live in the "bottoms" of Medallion, Ohio, which is actually up in the hills and is the black part of town, from the 1920s to the 1960s.Really, this book is about that black community. Their men have been sent to war (1 and 2) and have come back with physical and mental problems. They cannot work and can barely function. Men who can work are unable to get jobs solid enough to support their families--public works projects don't hire blacks (or only for the worst-paying jobs), and the businesses downtown won't either. They must make do as best they can. They cannot even farm effectively because "the bottoms" is no good for farming, being hilly. The women are the ones that pull together to get things done as they need doing--or doing what they think must be done. It is in this setting that the girls grow up. Nel marries young and has children, as is typical and expected. Sula goes to college and stays away for a decade, before coming home single and with her hometown morals/ethics gone. Perhaps the incidents with Chicken Little and her mother's death closed her mind to love and caring? Did she shut down after those two event, feeling responsible for both?

[lovinglit · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wow, this lady can write! Some of her sentences I had to read again in some sort of double take, as if I couldn't really believe how wonderful they were the first time. But reading them again just reinforced it. Some of it was too wonderful though, and it went right over my head. In this case, I just took the feeling from the words, which was also there loud and clear. Sula, is I suppose, an anti hero. She is suspiciously confident and challenging for a woman of her time. She makes some surprising decisions and leaves us wondering about her character. Her best and lifelong friend is Nel, and they go through a lot together in their early 20thC rural town. In this novel, I liked the writing more than the plot. And because you cant have a great book without both, I was left feeling a tiny bit disappointed. Even so I was left with a lovely feeling that I now know something that I didn't know. So that makes it very well worth the effort.

[kylekatz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

1973. Spoiler Alert. Sula is a book about an African-American community in Ohio called the Bottom from WWI to 1965. It follows the lives of Sula Peace and her friend Nel Wright Greene. Sula is a genuine free-spirit and much misunderstood in the Bottom. She doesn't go to church and she sleeps with a lot of men, but only casually. She simply doesn't accept the conventions and social customs of her community. Nel eventually marries and Sula goes away for ten years and then comes back. Whatever happened while she was away didn't change Sula and she sleeps with Nel's husband. This destroys their friendship, but Sula doesn't seem to understand why exactly. She thinks Nel has become too conventional. It is something like Sula has an artistic temperament, but no medium for her art except her imagination which no one can understand. So people think she's weird. Toni Morrison's beautiful writing make the story so much more than this bare description can contain. And there is a constant discourse about race. White people are only seen as unwelcome outsiders who occasionally cause problems for a person or hire them. They are never good, but they are capable of being neutral or evil. They are usually irrelevant unless they're making trouble. It is cool to read a story that centralizes black experience. i think I could think about Sula for a long time and discover more and more layers of complexity. I like the notion that the problem is that she's an artistic genius in a place and time where no space exists for her to develop her creativity in a healthy way. So she lives her life creatively. There are other possible interpretations though. She seems to border on psychotic at times, having possibly no conscience or no empathy for others. Perhaps being a narcissist. Possibly she's traumatized from accidentally drowning a boy when she was young. I did wonder whether she set her own mother on fire too. I think I'll need to read it again to see whether I missed anything the first time around.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a novel published in 1973. It covers the time period from WWII to the sixties. The setting is Ohio. We know that this time period was harsh time. There was extreme racism during this time period. This story is also about relationships, friendships, women, and family. I love Morrison's writing.

[sparemethecensor · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a stunning book that packs so much into its short pages. Morrison's writing is exquisite and the relationship between Nel and Sula is such a revealing and true rendering.

[elizaforest · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The first time I ever read something truthful about the reality of girls' relationships as they grow from children into women.

[kamgeb · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I always think I should like Toni Morrison books and each time I read one I remember why I dislike them. I hate the supernatural fiction. For example, in this book there are 3 boys who are all named Dewey and they never grow up and people can't tell them apart, even though they don't look similar or are even the same age. Also the book talked so much about sex. It seems like the main characters are just having random sex all the time. After I finished reading the book I was left with the feeling "What did I just read? None of it makes sense"

[brakketh-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Quite enjoyed this one. Read it at the recommendation of my sister. Found the stories interesting in their examination of the multiple viewpoints, I am aware there is much more analysis possible of this book.

[barakketh · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Quite enjoyed this one. Read it at the recommendation of my sister. Found the stories interesting in their examination of the multiple viewpoints, I am aware there is much more analysis possible of this book.

[paul9the9well9read · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Sula by African American female writer Toni Morrison demonstrates definitively why she was awarded the Nobel Prize. Her prose borders on poetry, painting rich and detailed pictures in very few words.
The general tone of this book strongly conveys the desperation and poverty Black Americans endure as the result of racism without ever talking about racism. Every moment, every episode hinges on the impoverished, second class citizen status of the character, yet the story is universal, the characters are not stereotypes but instead are typical of characters existing anywhere in the world. Sula and her friend Nel represent two very different types of people, those that are crushed by their circumstances and others who stand above them even as they continue to be marginalized.
The storyline begins with a scene from WW I and proceeds through the next several years tracing the lives of the protagonists, of their relationship with each other and with others, and of their ultimate movement in vastly different directions.
This is a powerful read eliciting empathy and compassion from any thoughtful reader.

[othemts · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Morrison's second novel is another one that I read on my own outside of college classes, and the one I remember the least.  The novel is set in the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio in the Black neighborhood jokingly known as The Bottom despite being on the hilltops adjacent to the white part of town in the valley. The main plot of the novel focuses on the friendship of two girls, Nel and Sula, growing up in the 1920s.  Nel is from a stable family with rigid rules while Sula's mother and grandmother are considered unconventional and loose.  Their close friendship turns on the accidental death of a child they were playing with, something they chose to keep secret.As they grow up, they go in different directions with Nel settling into a conventional marriage while Sula goes away to college and is rumored to have many sexual affairs.  When Sula returns after a ten year absence, she is decried as the personification of evil, and unites against her, especially when Sula sleeps with Nel's husband.  Nel and Sula do reconcile by the end of the novel.  A framing device set in the present day notes that The Bottom has ceased to exist and the hills have been gentrified for white peoples' home.In Sula, Morrison tells a story of a friendship between two Black women, something unusual in fiction up to that point. She creates two fully-developed, nuanced characters in Nel and Sula.  One chooses a conventional life and the other follows her own initiative but neither is judged as being the "good" or "bad" one, at least by the author.  The novel also shows the deleterious effects on a community living in segregation, and the internecine squabbles among Black people between "respectability" and embracing one's own identity

[sriddell_8 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a hard book to review. I've seen it call "grit lit" and gritty it is!

The story takes place in Medallion, a small town in Ohio, in the "Bottom" which is populated by the black community in town. While there is some interaction with the rest of the world, and many characters travel to and from Medallion, the world of the Bottom seems self-contained and very self-referential.

The main characters are two young girls who grow up as friends, inseparable as they grow up. The two could not be more different. Wildly different family backgrounds and values. But they find a connection in each other that seems like it can never be severed.

Without giving any spoilers, there is eventually a dramatic event that splits the two friends apart and becomes a defining moment for both of them.

Surrounding the two girls is a swirl of colorful characters:
- Three boys from different families and ages all re-named Dewey by Sula's grandmother and referred to as "the deweys" through the rest of the book
- A WWI veteran clearly suffering from PTSD (a term not yet coined when this book was written) who creates and publicly celebrates his own unique holiday: Suicide Day on January 3rd each year
- Sula's grandmother - a one-legged force of nature
- Sula's grandmother's lodger - a white addict re-christened "Tar Baby"

And there are a lot what must be allegorical references that I don't exactly understand. A plague of robins (of all things!), several people who are burned alive at various points in the book, a parade that ends up in tragedy when they march into an unfinished tunnel which then collapses and kills them all - on Suicide Day.

Overall an interesting book full of interesting characters, overlaid with determination to survive in the face of despair.

[greeniezona · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

After finishing Song of Solomon, I knew I had to read more Morrison, and thanks to the Book Riot podcast, I decided Sula was what I should read next.This book was marvelous. I am not going to say anything new about Morrison's writing -- she was a genius and it should be universally acknowledged. I loved this book for centering women and their complicated relationships, especially in a small town. Women trying to make lives, choosing from the narrow options afforded them as Black women in the early 20th century. It resists easy judgements on its characters and their actions even as it sets up Sula and New as opposites in some ways, their lives remain entangled and mirror each other in complicated ways.A gem of a novel.

[paulagalvan-323293 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sula is an unusual story about two inseparable friends—Sula and Nel—who share a guilty secret when they are twelve. As grownups, they follow separate paths, meeting again when they are thirty only to discover they are no longer the same people. Set in the colored section of Medallion, Ohio, called The Bottom, the story begins in 1919 after WWI and ends in 1965. It is beautifully written and peppered with colorful yet tragic characters living through hard times.

[clrichm · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I must admit: I selected this book to read because I needed an award-winning book from my birth year (still not certain whether they meant one written the year I was born or one that won its award that year). I’d never actually read anything by Toni Morrison, so it seemed a reasonable opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.Lovely writing, undeniably. Gorgeous word-painting. But it’s just possible that it’s been too long since I took a dive into literary fiction, because I sat back at the end and shook my head in bafflement. It took going to a review site and being shown all the symbolism and thematic significance and subtextual explorations of motherhood for me to see any of it at all.For me, I felt bad for Nel. (Also, little bit unnerved by the whole flashback of what she felt about Chicken Little’s death. Didn’t see that coming.) Sort of wondered if Sula had some sort of psychopathy going on, with all her thought about only seeing herself in Nel, and then only in pain and loneliness. REALLY didn’t see the whole thing with Shadrack coming, and if there’s some sort of symbolism there (review site didn’t mention it), then it went WAY over my head.I don’t think I liked it, but maybe I was just unable to grasp why I should.

[trinityyouth-780949 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Had to read this for school, actually was not half bad. spoiler alert: the main character is crazy as frick

[castlelass · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sula and Nel are friends who grow up in an impoverished black community in Ohio in the 1920s. After their involvement in a tragic event, which they keep secret, their friendship begins to disintegrate. Nel pursues a traditional life, while Sula follows an alternative path. Sula’s actions are seen as immoral and Nel begins to feel a sense of superiority, which is reinforced by the townspeople. Themes include motherhood, friendship, racism, classism, and shame. Morrison’s writing is beautiful even though the topics and events are often horrific. In the end, there is a ray of hope, as one of the characters arrives at understanding and acceptance. I can appreciate the literary merit of this book, while also have difficulties with some of the more gruesome subject matter.

[charon07 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A vivid look at the life of a small-town African American community in the 1920s and 1930s. Though the blurbs made me think it would be a story of two women's friendship, it was as much about the townspeople and their dynamics and the context of Sula and Nel's friendship.

[reader1009-863136 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Adult fiction. Great storytelling done by the narrator (and of course, by Morrison). Listening to it 20-min. at a time during my work commute probably isn't the best way to enjoy it though.

[burritapal · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A story that takes place in the early part of the 20th century, in a segregated black community outside of a small town in Ohio, it's full of Morrison's unique descriptions that allows the reader to see and smell the descriptions in their mind's eye: The loamy Earth, the humid air, the different shades of the resident's skins. Vivid characters populate this tale: Eva, whose husband walked out on her and their three kids. Eva's grandchild Sula is the protagonist. Mental disorders, poverty, and men who create and abandon their children make this story full of a pathos that the reader will feel.

[stahl2ricco · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Evil has descended on the town of Medallion , and her name is Sula. “Their evidence against Sula was contrived, but their conclusions about her were not.” Needless to say, she's not very popular amongst the townsfolk.The subject is a bit dark and sad, but the writing is superb! It is beautiful and lyrical in its descriptions of characters, setting, and pain. The suffering of the characters was tangible to me, and hard to separate myself from. Even with an ending I didn't love, I was totally immersed in this book, and in awe of the author's skills!

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Morrison's second novel is another short, deceptively slight-looking book, set in a small black community on the fringes of an Ohio town in the inter-war years. It's not explicitly a political story, the plot is about a friendship between two women, but Morrison makes it pretty clear that everything that happens in the story is influenced and constrained by the nature of relations between white and black, male and female in that time and place. Even the settlement itself grew up where it is because the land there wasn't valuable enough to be wanted by white farmers; in a pair of frame chapters from a 1960s viewpoint, the narrator tells us that the settlement has since disappeared, not because of racial integration but because hilly land became attractive for suburban houses and golf courses and the black families couldn't afford to stay.Morrison sets up the contrast between two matriarchal clans, on the one hand the Wrights, driven by the need for respectability and by Helene Wright's shame about her southern mixed-race background, and on the other the Peaces, anarchistic women who see themselves as having nothing to lose and no reason to keep to anyone else's rules. Nel Wright and Sula Peace become friends across this social divide as small children, and maintain the warm, close friendship through a number of grotesque incidents right into adulthood, until they are finally forced to recognise the depth of the ethical gap between them when Sula does something she sees as trivial and Nel as fundamental.Morrison steers away here from the kind of stylistic flourishes that got her into trouble with critics in The bluest eye, but she goes for narrative excesses instead: there are magic-realist elements where the external world is reacting in strange ways to the actions of the characters, and many of the darker human incidents in the plot have a non-realistic, fairy-tale flavour to them, especially the climactic scene where the inhabitants of the township are led Pied-Piper style to their collective doom. She seems to be flexing her muscles and telling the critics: "Just because I'm an African-American woman, that doesn't mean I've got to restrict myself to writing social-realistic political fiction." But there's also perhaps a sense that the situation of black people in America is something that isn't adequately to be described within the confines of realistic fiction: we need this element of fairy-tale to make sense of the recent past and start to understand how it continues to affect our relations in the present.

[boredgames · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

the writing is impeccable. morrison weaves girlhood, the personal and political and social gossip in a masterful way. i loved it and the swampy evocativeness and brutality of windswept Bottom and the memorable characters: Eva, Shadrack, Ajax, Chicken Little. fairytale inflections

[zeborah · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

One of those plots that consists of one thing happening after another (in this case usually much after another; short as it is, it takes place over a good fifty year period) and it's up to the reader to put the meaning of it all together. So it stays with you, but it's a challenge.I can see why Sula is the title character, but I think it's not just her story - nor just the story of the friendship between her and Nel - but rather it's about the three of them: Shadrack too, and the accident that threw them briefly together.And the place, of course; of course it's about the place.

[feleciak-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

After having read The Bluest Eye my expectations were really high. I was deflated. Sula isn't a bad read; it's just ok. The story moved along disjointed, which made it hard to follow at times. I finished the book trying to understand its meaning; which is good, I suppose, for discussion. It's not on my list of highly recommended books but I do recommend it.

[chrisblocker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Having read other early Morrison novels, I found nothing surprising in Sula. There's the same gorgeous language and calming tone one will find in The Bluest Eye or Beloved, all layered over some of the most horrific scenes in print. More recent Morrison novels are told in the same beguiling whisper, but lack the urgency, and as a result, much of the story, that her earlier works show so abundantly.Compared to the other early works of Morrison I have read, Sula was similar, but its characters and scenes did not stick with me the same way her others had. Perhaps I'd grown accustomed to the richness of her stories and had too high of expectations. I wonder if it isn't that, for such a short novel, my attention was too divided. Despite being named after one of its characters, Sula is the least focused on a sole character of the Morrison I have read. It really is the story of Sula and Nel, with equal time spent on Eva's story. All this division of focus in 174 pages left me unattached to the story; nevertheless, I enjoyed Morrison's evocative storytelling and the interactions between the characters. I look forward to the next.

[amerynth · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Toni Morrison's "Sula" is a wonderful book, propelled along by the writer's amazing gift for language. Her prose really evokes the feeling of the Bottom community from the early 1900's to the 1960's and its populace.The story centers on the friendship between two girls -- Sula and Nel and how it changes over the years. The story's core is sadness, showing how an African-American community, free from slavery but not from racist attitudes, struggled. There is a definitely a lot of story packed into this short novel.

[aliceanna-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A brilliant slice of Americana. Morrison blithely works a spell of magic on the "Valley" bringing life and light to her characters. A bygone era when people knew who they were - individuals!

[vdunn-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I haven't read all of Toni Morrison's books, but I have read several, and this was, by far, the best. She honed the prose to a razor sharp edge that cut you to the core. You felt the characters' breath on your face as they lifted out of the book and into your mind and heart.