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Books

Racism, paedophilia and an inverted Snow White

Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child offers disappointingly flimsy answers to some seriously important questions, says Sarah Churchwell

2 May 2015

9:00 AM

2 May 2015

9:00 AM

God Help the Child Toni Morrison

Chatto, pp.178, £14.99

God Help the Child, Toni Morrison’s 11th novel, hearkens back to two of her earliest. Like The Bluest Eye, it is a story of internalised racism and paedophilia; like Tar Baby it is a fable about sexual and racial autonomy in the form of a love story between a beautiful, vain woman and a man who thinks she has lost her moral compass.

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