Another Saturday Morning Mini Book Review: The Color Purple

Please don't be mad, but I didn't love this book.

I went in basically completely blind, I've never seen the movie or the musical, but I feel like there's always a risk you take when you read something so beloved and critically acclaimed that your expectations are like, "this book is gonna change my life," or whatever and then there's just no winning.

I understand why this book means so much to people; it deals with a lot of really important topics and famously portrays a romantic relationship between two Black women at a time both in history and in literature when that was a very risky thing to do. The reasons I didn't love it are really a matter of personal taste (as is everything about reviewing books, I guess). It deals with some really intense topics (literally, page one features an incest-rape scene), there are one thousand characters and keeping track of who they are and their relationships to each other was annoying, and it takes place over a really long period of time, but it felt super vague about time period and I was always unclear as to how much time was passing. It's an epistolary book but none of the entries are dated so I had to figure things out with very limited context clues. Maybe it's nit-picky, but I just wanted more clarity.

What I liked about this book were the candid discussions between the characters about religion and spirituality. In the forward, Alice Walker discusses how this book and these characters helped her explore her own relationship to God and the church and her faith, and I can see her working out those feelings in the text in a way that is very moving and beautiful.

Although this book didn't necessarily meet my expectations, I am now very curious about how it was adapted to a film and a musical, cause I personally wouldn't know where to start.