The first page of Toni Morrison's novel Love is a soft introduction to a narrator who pulls you in with her version of a tale of the ocean-side community of Up Beach, a once popular ocean resort. Morrison introduces an enclave of people who react to one man--Bill Cosey--and to each other as they tell of his affect on generations of characters living in the seaside community. One clear truth here, told time and again, is how folks love and hate each other and the myriad ways it's manifested; these versions of humanity are seen in almost every line. Monsters and ghosts creep into young girls' dreams and around corners and then return to staid ladies' lives as they age and remember friendships and cold battles. Men and women--Heed, Romen, Junior, Christine, Celestial, and the rest of Morrison's cast--cry and sing out their weaknesses and strengths in rotating perspectives. Sandler, a Cosey employee, is a brilliant agent of Morrison's descriptions of human behavior, "Then, in a sudden shift of subject that children and heavy drinkers enjoy, 'My son, Billy was about your age. When he died, I mean.'" And Romen is allowed to play hero by saving a young girl from a brutal gang rape, while at the same time, he battles disgust like no superhuman would be caught dead feeling.

Though slim in pages, Morrison constructs Love with a precision and elegance that shows her characters' flaws and fears with brutal accuracy. Love may be less complex than others in the grand Morrison oeuvre, but not because Morrison performs literary hand-holding. Readers will experience in this smooth, sharp-eyed gem another instance of the Toni Morrison craftsmanship: she enters your mind, hangs a tale or two there, and leaves just as quietly as she came. --E. Brooke Gilbert


From Publishers Weekly
At the center of this haunting, slender eighth novel by Nobel winner Morrison is the late Bill Cosey-entrepreneur, patriarch, revered owner of the glorious Cosey Hotel and Resort (once "the best and best-known vacation spot for colored folk on the East Coast") and captivating ladies' man. When the novel opens, the resort has long been closed, and Cosey's mansion shelters only two feuding women, his widow, Heed, and his granddaughter, Christine. Then sly Junior Viviane, fresh out of "Reform, then Prison," answers the ad Heed placed for a companion and secretary, and sets the novel's present action-which is secondary to the rich past-in motion. "Rigid vipers," Vida Gibbons calls the Cosey women; formerly employed at the Cosey resort, Vida remembers only its grandeur and the benevolence of its owner, though her husband, Sandler, knew the darker side of Vida's idol. As Heed and Christine feud ("Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy: it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself"), Junior of the "sci-fi eyes" vigorously seduces Vida and Sandler's teenage grandson. In lyrical flashbacks, Morrison slowly, teasingly reveals the glories and horrors of the past-Cosey's suspicious death, the provenance of his money, the vicious fight over his coffin, his disputed will. Even more carefully, she unveils the women in Cosey's life: his daughter-in-law, May, whose fear that civil rights would destroy everything they had worked for drove her to kleptomania and insanity; May's daughter, Christine, who spent hard years away from the paradise of the hotel; impoverished Heed the Night Johnson, who became Cosey's very young "wifelet"; the mysterious "sporting woman" Celestial; and L, the wise and quiet former hotel chef, whose first-person narration weaves throughout the novel, summarizing and appraising lives and hearts. Morrison has crafted a gorgeous, stately novel whose mysteries are gradually unearthed, while Cosey, its axis, a man "ripped, like the rest of us, by wrath and love," remains deliberately in shadow, even as his family burns brightly, terribly around him.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Bill Cosey's male magnetism attracts the women who inhabit Morrison's pages. Some commanding, some flighty, all are drawn to Cosey's passion. Once, Cosey's Hotel and Resort on the beach was the place for "colored folk on the East Coast." Now, the run-down structure is home to his contentious widow and granddaughter. Through a series of retrospectives, the mystery of the questionable circumstances surrounding Cosey's death and his role in each woman's life gradually unfolds. Morrison confronts issues of race in America, particularly the deep disappointment of many African-Americans in the face of ineffectual civil rights legislation. Aching with melancholy for another, better, time, a time left in a troubled past, Morrison's novel combines elegance of language with a lush, luxurious reading to make "must listening." S.J.H. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Despite the simplicity of its title, Love is a profound novel. A Nobel laureate must feel considerable pressure to keep performing on a higher level than other writers. With her latest novel, Morrison slaps our face with the fact that she is better than most. The book has the tone of an elegy, for it emerges as a remembrance of and yearning for past times and past people in a black seaside community. There were days, back in the 1940s and 1950s, when the Cosey Hotel and Resort was the place for blacks to vacation, dance, and dine. Bill Cosey, a charismatic figure greatly attractive to women, ran the resort. But now Bill is dead, and the story is, as we see, not only a paean to past good times but also a portrait of Bill Cosey's power. Unusual for blacks at the time, Bill did enjoy power, both economic and social, for as far as the boundaries of his coastal town reached--his kingdom by the sea. Now, in his absence, the women in his life jockey for their own power in the vacuum he left behind; their world now revolves around his will, scribbled many years ago on a dirty menu. The novel's section headings tell the tale of the different roles Bill played in these women's lives: friend, benefactor, lover, and husband, among others. At least in her later novels, Morrison can stand to be criticized for obscurantism, which is also the case, to a certain degree, here; in fact, readers may want to compose a chart as they read, to keep characters and their relationships to each other straight. But as a vivid painter of human emotions, Morrison is without peer, her impressions rendered in an exquisitely metaphoric but comfortably open style. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
“Like love at first sight, it has the ability to startle.” –The Boston Globe

“A deeply affecting work by a Great American Novelist who is still . . . at the top of her form. . . . Morrison’s tender, taut prose wastes no word, no syllable, no letter. . . . A novel of devastating revelations, impeccably arranged.” –The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A marvelous work, which enlarges our conception not only of love but of racial politics, the ubiquitous past and . . . paradise.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A dense, dark star of a novel . . . with Morrison writing at the top of her game.” –Newsweek

“Toni Morrison reframes the mythology of love in a dark light and comes away with a mesmerizing gem.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Like every other stealthy Morrison novel, Love has closets and cellars, bolt-holes and trap-doors and card tricks. . . . Yet again, she gives us dreams.” –John Leonard, Vanity Fair

“The carefully crafted work of a storyteller entirely unburdened by her Nobel Prize. . . . William Faulkner and Eudora Welty would feel right welcome. . . . The moral palette of this novel displays a full range of colors.” –The Christian Science Monitor

“A profound commentary on the power of love.” –The Baltimore Sun

“Love is slim and tight as a folded fan, yet from it the author flashes a panorama three generations wide. . . . When the reader closes the book . . . there is the satisfaction of a song that has ended just right. The standing soloist we applaud . . . is the fierce literary intelligence of Morrison striking the chords of human experience and playing it wise.” –The Miami Herald

“Magisterial and gripping . . . a knockout. . . . A reminder of what a marvel a novel can be.” –Rocky Mountain News

“To enter a novel by Morrison is to enter a world fully imagined, and Love is no exception. . . . Love takes you on the first page and holds you in the welcome spell of a writer who knows what she’s doing, and who can slip into the most ordinary sentence a twist of surprise.” –San Jose Mercury News

“Love is Morrison back at the peak of her talent. . . . The novel lives up to its name and puts to rest any doubts that its author is anything except great.” –New York Daily News

“[A] beautifully wrought meditation on society, family and human nature . . . brimming with provocative, beautiful writing.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Love . . . [is] like that song you remember from long ago, the one you danced to, sweet and slow, and which has haunted you ever since. . . . Morrison’s tale lies in its telling, not just the lilting lyricism of her prose but also the insight into her characters’ hidden hearts.” –The Orlando Sentinel

“For pure pleasure, it deserves to be read more than once.” –The Plain Dealer

“There is beauty and wisdom in Love. . . . Her lyrical talent and her profound intelligence . . . make themselves felt.” –The New York Observer


Review
"It's a dense, dark star of a novel, seemingly eccentric, secretly shapely, and with Morrison writing at the top of her game." -- David Gates, Newsweek

"Haunting. In lyrical flashbacks, Morrison slowly, teasingly reveals the glories and horrors of the past. Morrison has crafted a gorgeous, stately novel." -- Publisher's Weekly

"Love is a profound novel. As a vivid painter of human emotions, Morrison is without peer, her impressions rendered in an exquisitely metaphoric but comfortably open style." -- Brad Hooper, Booklist (starred and boxed review)

"A gorgeous deployment of enigmatic flashbacks, Love is an elegantly shaped epic of infatuation, enslavement, and liberation: a rich and heartening return to Nobel-worthy form." -- Kirkus (starred review)

?Love seduces with Toni Morrison?s signature lush prose and colorfully complex, textured scenes of human longing, suffering, and loss. She long ago claimed a place at the apex of American letters; her latest outing adds another darkly sparkling layer to that literary luster.? -- Elle (US)

Praise for Toni Morrison:
?There?s no escaping love in Toni Morrison?s novels: it?s a difficult, complicated, ferocious force that runs like a deep and turbulent river through all her fiction, sometimes transporting and sometimes destroying people. It?s no wonder her own characters cry out against it.? -- Catherine Bush

?To read [Paradise] is to be pulled into a passionate, contentious and sometimes violent world and to confront questions as old as human civilization itself. . . . It is a tale of Faulknerian complexity and power.? -- Time

?In each of her six novels she excavates the past, tunnelling through atrocities and griefs to reach back into an American history that has been long buried. The denied past becomes a ghost that haunts the present; old bones won?t stay safely underground.? -- Toronto Star

?In [Morrison?s] landscape, ghosts mingle with runaway slaves and wild men and women of the forest. Nothing and no one is ordinary, and perceptions shift as she reinvents the world.? -- The Globe and Mail

?In her novel Beloved. . .Ms. Morrison restores to the collective memory a particular strand of its emotive past, turning a story of former slaves into what amounts to a national epic. . . . She offers everyone -- not just those injured -- the chance to feel the pain, the injustice and the need for healing.? -- The New York Times Book Review

?The suppleness of her language verges on poetry. . . . The intensity of carnal love and the intensity of affection among strangers make for a kind of paradise.? -- The Financial Post

FROM THE PUBLISHER

May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L: all women obsessed with Bill Cosey. The wealthy owner of the famous Cosey's Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is either the void in, or the center of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces - a troubles past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.

This audacious exploration into the nature of love - its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread - is rich in characters, striking scenes, and a profound understanding of how alive the past can be.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Like all of Morrison's best fiction, this is a village novel. Race and racism, ancillary concerns in Love for the most part, throw the small groups she writes about back upon one another, steeping their passions. Even when the setting is contemporary, Morrison's books feel old-fashioned, set in a world where the perpetual distraction of the media hasn't diluted people's fascination with their neighbors, where the misadventures of J.Lo and P. Diddy don't siphon off attention from the scandal next door. Morrison is, as always, interested in the face-off between the respectable and the not, between the clean, orderly, responsible citizens of Silk, the town where the Cosey women live, and the unchaste, shoeless ne'er-do-wells of neighborhoods like the Settlement and Up Beach, where one of the Cosey women started out. — Laura Miller

The New York Review of Books

...Love may be about passion between men and women, or family ties, or the tenderness the elderly feel for the young about to make their own mistakes, but in the end it seems to have the most to say about how women love, which is perhaps different from the way men do. The novel is modest in length, but constantly suggestive, a beautiful, haunting work about two wasted lives that also mourns for a certain time in black live. — Darryl Pinckney

Publishers Weekly

More a tapestry than a novel, Morrison's newest weaves the past into the present using perspectives as threads and voices as color. The author's soft voice forces listeners to pay close attention; even so, the novel's complex construction, coupled with her hushed tones, will have listeners reaching for "rewind" to capture the subtle details so important in Morrison's compositions. This audiobook is best suited for those prepared to concentrate closely and wait patiently as layer builds upon layer. The story opens in the 1930s on the Florida coast when L, who narrates the story from beyond the grave, sees Cosey holding his wife, Julia, in the ocean; L feels such waves of tenderness radiating off him that she signs on to his life forever and becomes both maid and chef at his hotel. The novel winds through the lives of Cosey's other women, including his granddaughter Christine and her best friend, Heed the Night Johnson. Cosey twirls them all around his little finger, abruptly and unapologetically marrying the 12-year-old Heed. Thread by thread, the novel builds as Cosey's women glitter around him, even after his death. Morrison leaves readers with the powerful realization: neither good nor evil, Cosey was simply a man. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Forecasts, Sept. 1, 2003). (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

When gorgeous and amoral Junior arrives in the Southern coastal town of Silk, chance brings her to a deadly crossroads. She talks herself into a job at the center of a love/hate feud between two elderly women, the remaining members of a clan who once defined Silk's African American elite. The tension involves the late Bill "Papa" Cosey and the riches he achieved during his heyday in the 1940s and 1950s as proprietor of a fabulous resort. Along the way, he obtained the intense love of many women, including granddaughter Christine, lower-class child bride Heed, and spectacular "sporting woman" Celestial. Eight compact chapters named for aspects of Cosey's character ("Benefactor," "Lover," "Guardian," and so on) present the shifting perspectives of those entranced by this charismatic, secretive man long after his death. Nobel Laureate Morrison's latest is a vividly narrated exploration of the pleasures, burdens, and distortions of obsessive devotion. Given the book's brevity, the dialog must carry the story convincingly-and, of course, Morrison is a master at this. Certainly, this book won't disappoint readers already familiar with Morrison and will serve as a good introduction for those new to her. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/03.]-Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews