Tar Baby

By Toni Morrison,

Book cover of Tar Baby

Book description

A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner

Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Tar Baby as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I came to Toni Morrison a little late. This was in the 1980s, after she’d won the Pulitzer. I read Song of Solomon first, upon the recommendation of a friend who told me he couldn’t read the end of the novel without bursting into tears. Next, Beloved: I was so awed that I reread it five times in a row!

At that point, I realized that I needed to circle back and start with her first books. The Bluest Eye and Sula both stunned me.

Then came Tar Baby. I immediately understood it to be different from the…

From David's list on complicated Black-white relations.

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