Celie's fiercest wish is to keep her sister Nettie out of the life that has been handed to her. She is poor, she is growing up in rural Georgia, and she is not allowed to say what is being done to her. So she writes it down, in letters addressed to God, and those letters become the whole shape of the novel. We meet her as a girl of fourteen and stay with her for twenty years, which is long enough to watch a person learn to say her own name.
The voice is the first thing you notice, and for some readers it is the first hurdle. Celie's early letters are clipped and fragmentary, the way a young person writes when she has been taught that what she thinks doesn't matter, and the sentences take a little patience to piece together. Stay with it. As her mindset shifts, the writing opens up with her, and the shift from letters to God to letters to Nettie, who has gone off to Africa with a missionary family, tells you more about her inner life than any narrator could. It is the book's best structural idea, and Walker uses it with a lot of feeling.
What the novel does to a reader is hard to separate from the people who crowd around Celie. Shug Avery, a jazz singer who also happens to be her husband's mistress, brings a zest for life into Celie's cramped world and shows her another way to live. Sophia, her stepson's wife, pushes her to fight for her own independence. These women are drawn with humor and snap, and they keep a harrowing story from collapsing into misery. Readers talk about how close they feel to these characters and how much they want Celie to win. Even the sorrow arrives with a pulse of wit, which keeps the book from reading as a catalog of suffering. There is Celie's own dry way of putting things, a sharpness she hardly seems to know she has, and it surfaces just when the page has become almost too heavy to turn.
It is not an easy book, and nobody who has read it will tell you otherwise. The abuse and brutality of the opening stretch are direct, and the harshness of Celie's husband is not softened. Readers who know the film or the stage musical often say the book is more forthcoming, especially about Celie and Shug, and goes places those versions only hint at. If you come to it expecting the film beat for beat, you'll notice what was left out and understand the story better for the difference. The cruelty is the weight that makes the later turns count.
Why you should read
- Epistolary novels with a distinctive first-person voice
- Book-club picks that spark real discussion
- Fans of the film or Broadway musical
- Stories of women finding strength in each other
What to expect
- Letters rather than chapters, spanning two decades
- An early voice that takes some adjusting to
- Harsh abuse and racism depicted directly
- An emotional, ultimately uplifting arc
By the final letters, Celie has gone from a girl nobody asked to a woman with a full, unapologetic life, and getting there costs the reader something. Walker makes the cost worthwhile. This is a book about what it takes to be seen, told in the plain, stubborn voice of someone who finally insists on it.
