Descriptions, Reviews, etc.
Description:
This novel reates a magical world out of four generations of black life in America, a world readers enter on the day of the birth of Macon Dead, Jr.; the day on which lonely Robert Smith attempts to fly from a steeple of the hospital, a black Icarus looking homeward.
Review Quotes: "A rich, full novel. . . . It lifts us up [and] impresses itself upon us like a love affair." --The New York Times Book Review
"A rhapsodic work. . . . Intricate and inventive."
--The New Yorker "Stunningly beautiful. . . . Full of magnificent people. . . . They are still haunting my house. I suspect they will be with me forever."
--Anne Tyler, The Washington Post
"If Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man went underground, Toni Morrison's Milkman flies."
--John Leonard, The New York Times Book Review "It places Toni Morrison in the front rank of contemporary American writers. She has written a novel that will endure."
--The Washington Post "Lovely. . . . A delight, full of lyrical variety and allusiveness. . . . [An] exceptionally diverse novel."
--The Atlantic Monthly "Morrison is a terrific storyteller. . . . Her writing evokes the joyful richness of life."
--Newsday "Morrison dazzles. . . . She creates a black community strangely unto itself yet never out of touch with the white world. . . . With an ear as sharp as glass she has listened to the music of black talk and uses it as a palette knife to create black lives and to provide some of the best fictional dialogue around today."
--The Nation "A marvelous novel, the most moving I have read in ten years of reviewing."
--Cleveland Plain Dealer "Toni Morrison has created a fanciful world here. . . . She has an impeccable sense of emotional detail. She's the most sensible lyrical writer around today."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer "A fine novel exuberantly constructed. . . . So rich in its use of common speech, so sophisticated in its use of literary traditions and language from the Bible to Faulkner . . . it is also extremely funny."
--The Hudson Review "Toni Morrison is an extraordinarily good writer. Two pages into anything she writes one feels the power of her language and the emotional authority behind that language. . . . One closes the book warmed through by the richness of its sympathy, and by its breathtaking feel for the nature of sexual sorrow."
--The Village Voice "Morrison moves easily in and out of the lives and thoughts of her characters, luxuriating in the diversity of circumstances and personality, and revelling in the sound of their voices and of her own, which echoes and elaborates theirs."
--The New Yorker
