BOOKS

The-Color-Purple_9780143135692

Curator Reviews

Gloria Steinem

Because she makes the invisible visible, and redeems people who seem irredeemable, she makes every reader feel visible and redeemable, too.

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Damian Barr

This book will break your heart. I don’t mean, you’ll weep gently into a pillow - you will scream with rage and shake your fists at the heavens at the injustice of it all. Set in 1930s Georgia and written as a series of letters from Celie to her sister Nettie, who has been banished to an unnamed country Africa to become a missionary, this searing novel shows how cruel life could be for African-American women there and then. Written in Celie’s voice and her idiom it was pioneering and I still can’t quite believe I was taught it at school. What’s striking (or depressing) is how contemporary the violence, and resistance, feels. Black lives mattered then and now.

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Janet Mock

Celie’s audacity to give her journey words through prayer instilled in me an audacity to say that yes, I am deserving of testimony and deserve to be heard.

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Gabrielle Union

My favorite Alice Walker piece that tells the stories of black women in the South in the 1930s. If you've seen the movie, you will find the book to still be timely and relevant and painfully moving.

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