| Love | |
| Author: | Toni Morrison |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | African-American literature |
| Publisher: | Alfred A. Knopf |
| Release Date: | 2003 |
| Media Type: | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages: | 208 pp |
| Isbn: | 978-0-375-40944-8 |
| Dewey: | 813/.54 21 |
| Congress: | PS3563.O8749 L68 2003 |
| Oclc: | 52039575 |
| Preceded By: | Paradise |
| Followed By: | A Mercy |
Love (2003) is the eighth novel by Toni Morrison. Written in Morrison's non-linear style, the novel tells of the lives of several women and their relationships to the late Bill Cosey.
Cosey was a charismatic hotel owner, and the people around him were affected by his life — even long after his death. The main characters are Christine, his granddaughter and Heed, his widow. The two are the same age and used to be friends but some forty years after Cosey's death they are sworn enemies, and yet share his mansion. Again Morrison uses split narrative and jumps back and forth throughout the story, not fully unfolding until the very end. The characters in the novel all have some relation to the infamous Bill Cosey.
Similar to the concept of communication between the living and the dead in her 1987 novel Beloved, Morrison introduced a character named Junior; she was the medium to connect the dead Bill Cosey to the world of the living.
The storytelling techniques in Love, namely the split narrative, suggest a recent trend in Morrison's literature that divides the plot among different time periods.
According to Book Marks, the book received "rave" reviews based on ten critic reviews with eight being "rave" and one being "positive" and one being "mixed".[1] The Daily Telegraph reported on reviews from several publications with a rating scale for the novel out of "Love It", "Pretty Good", "Ok", and "Rubbish": Sunday Telegraph and Literary Review reviews under "Love It" and Daily Telegraph and Observer reviews under "Pretty Good" and Sunday Times review under "Ok" and Times and TLS reviews under "Rubbish".[2] In Bookmarks January/February 2004 issue, a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (2.5 out of 5) based on critic reviews with the critical summary saying, "What accounts for the wildly divergent reviews of Love?".[3] [4]
Elaine Showalter, writing in The Guardian, praised it as "a disarmingly compact, unpompous book ... full of quirky, perverse characters and provocative, unfashionable ideas."[5] In The New York Times, Laura Miller compared Love favorably to some of Morrison's earlier works, such as Beloved and Sula.[6]