The Color Purple: A Novel

The Color Purple is an unforgettable read. The storytelling is raw, emotional, and incredibly powerful, and the characters feel so real that they stay with you long after you finish. Alice Walker’s writing is both heartbreaking and hopeful, capturing resilience, love, and transformation in a way few novels do. A timeless classic that absolutely deserves its praise.

Great book with some differences in the movie. Story is the same but sprinkled in more details. You should know the book is always better. I loved it & you will too.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker captures the journey of Celie, a poor black girl, from age fourteen well into adulthood. Rather than chapters, the novel is broken up and written as multiple letters to God. Celie, the main character, writes about her life this way because after her Pa sexually abused her, he said, “You better not tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy,” (1). After two pregnancies at the hand of her father, Celie is married off to a man who degrades and beats her. The novel transitions from letters to God to letters to Celie’s sister Nettie, who joined a family on a missionary in Africa. This shift also reveals a shift in Celie’s mindset, who throughout the novel discovers herself and her religious beliefs. Celie’s life improves as she finds examples in other black women, such as learning to stand up for herself and seeing her own self worth. When I first started reading, I found it difficult, both stylistically and morally. Since the first letters are written when Celie is very young, the sentence fragments are hard to piece together, as seen on page 2 when Celie says, “She ast me bout the first one Whose is it?” However as the novel progresses and Celie ages, the letters are easier to understand and become deeper content wise. Within the first page, there is blunt description of sexual abuse, which reoccurred many times throughout the book. The casual discussion of abuse was hard to get used to, however it succeeded in getting the point across that life for black women in the early 1900s was anything but easy. I liked being able to read a story from a perspective that I have never encountered before. Celie’s progression from hardships to independence and strength was inspiring. I felt that the ending was satisfying, and that I could be happy knowing that Celie found peace in her later life. Alice Walker achieved her goal in inspiring others to carve their own path in life. For example, the novel has two strong female characters who helped teach Celie to be independent. A character named Sophia hit back whenever her husband Harpo hit her. She refused to take a beating from a man, and inspired Celie to stand up for herself. Another character named Shug protected Celie from her abusive husband, which gave Celie the courage to speak up in front of him. At one point Celie describes these women by saying, “You know Shug will fight...She live her life and be herself no matter what,” (253). At the end of the novel, Celie is last seen happy and not being abused by any men. This shows that she took her life into her own hands and made the changes necessary to live a happy life. Although she was born into a poor home and was married off to an abusive man without consent, Celie in the end carved her own path and found strength in others. The novel also shows Celie’s intellectual progression by the syntax becoming more complex towards the end. The reader find Celie contemplating deeper topics rather than just stating the events of her day through fragmented sentences.

Deep, real, transendental. Heartfelt, intelligent, insightful. And total page turner. Super engaging, never could put it down. Highly recommend anybody interested in life.

Celie comes from a very poor family & her mother is very during her last two pregnancies. Being the oldest of the girls, she has to do most all the work around the house, cooking, cleaning, laundry & helping with her younger sisters & brothers. Her Pa doesn’t like her either & the only one she’s close to is her younger sister. As Celie’s mother gets sicker & sicker, her Pa begins visiting her room when she’s 14 y.o.to fill the needs her mother is no longer able to provide. Her mother passes away. Celie has 2 children by him, a daughter & a son before he tires of her & forces her into marriage to a man who beats & abuses her. Her father marries another young girl & Celia gets her younger sister, Nettie, to come live with her & continue her schooling. The man Celie marries is in love with another woman, Shug Avery, & is out late most nights & sometimes several days but he expects Celie to wait on him & his kids from a previous marriage & they don’t respect Celie ant more than her husband does. Celie is still trying to figure out how she feels about God & she writes a lot of letters to God expressing her emotions & doubts. This story covers the hardships & abuse of Celie & many of the people of color she knows. It doesn’t sugar coat the racism involved in their lives & the disadvantages as a result of this predjudice that carries over even in today’s world. Of course, black women were even less appreciated, treated as property & had a much more difficult time than even men of color. It’s a very moving story overall & very well written.

This book is really good, I watched the movie 🍿 when I was a teenager and I enjoyed reading the book last year, because I'm in a book club, and that was the book of the month, it's amazing how strong and resilient the character is, I forgot her name... I read about 60% of it I highly recommend it

The book discussion group met in March 2017 to enthusiastically discuss this. Wow, we loved this book. Most of us had seen the movie at some point in the past (and a few of us had seen the Oprah-produced Broadway musical), but it turns out this is a favorite book of a few members of the group and everybody liked it lot. We rarely get this kind of universal praise for a book, so you know that if you didn't read it for group, you should still definitely put it on your list of books to read. Most of us agreed that the language is tough and off-putting for the first few letters, but you both get used to the odd spellings and grammar and also the writing gets better at Celie writes more. After eight or ten letters, it all seems pretty normal. The violence and cruelty is also tough and off-putting in the first part of the book but again, it gets less violent and you get used to it (what a horrifying thought!) as the novel continues. The words that readers used to describe the events and language in the novel are "epic," "biblical," "powerful," and finally "beautiful." The story seems huge and the family tree is complicated with parents, step-parents, unacknowledged parents, forced marriages, lovers and mistresses, as well as two dead unnamed mothers. But the major characters are clearly defined and change during the novel and, unlike many novels, the changes are clearly explained and well motivated by events in the novel. Celie is so desperate to be loved that she loves everyone else without thinking of herself. The men are largely evil (this is probably a valid criticism of the novel) who are forced to learn and change by the strong and far more admirable women who shape them. We enjoyed discussing butch and femme women (as well as the stupidly masculine men as compared to the loving and generous men), the open lesbianism, and the alternate Christian theology presented largely by the openly sexual Shug. I thought that the African letters from Nettie were a bit dry and anthropological compared to Celie's personal and emotive letters. And a few of the readers thought that the ending was perhaps too happy with everyone turning out to be a better, more evolved character. But these are quibbles compared to the well-drawn characters, the wide scope, the emotional fulfillment, and the positive changes that most of the characters undergo.

The novel, The Color Purple, is about the main character, Celie, and her sister Nettie. Some other characters are Celie and Nettie’s stepfather, Celie’s husband, and Celie’s lover, Shug. It uses detailed imagery to paint a picture of all of the characters, their physical and emotional attributes. The main theme throughout the novel is how people of certain races and genders are mistreated throughout the era of the 1940s. The main character, Celie, is abused by her stepfather, verbally and physically. It shows her struggle from being stuck in his clutches, to becoming her own person, and earning her independence. She discovers things about herself, and discovers things about other people, and what they mean to her in certain aspects of her life. My favorite character was Celie, this is because the reader can see the progress she makes over the course of the book, and I think the strength that she finds within herself is inspiring and encouraging. I relate to Celie, and all the other characters in the book that have been mistreated, or abused. This is because I empathize for them, and I have had friends that have been mistreated, and I understand how it affects a person's well being, and besides that, their self esteem. I loved the book, I loved the type of insight it gave into an aspect of life that no other author really covers. My favorite part of this book was the part where Celie begins to realize that she is worth more than what she is being given. Through the support of her lover, Shug, she gains self-confidence and realizes that she did not deserve the horrible treatment that she received throughout her entire life. She had to withstand being molested by her step-father, basically being held captive by him, and then in a sense, he “sold” her to the man he thought would need her housekeeping skills the most. She constantly had to go through only being thought of as a piece of meat, and property, almost the maid of every house she walked into. The only thing I would change about this book would be the beginning of the exchange of letters between Nettie and Celie, the first section where it is just about 20 pages of Nettie’s letters to Celie are a bit hard to grasp and get interested in enough to get through that section. Although I am happy I did, because past that, the book was amazing! I read about what was happening in the African village that nettie was in, but also got to see what was happening in Celie’s life. I would definitely recommend this book to any of my friends, it has a great insight on the lives of black women in the 1940s, and unique.

Funny at times. Sad at times. Enlightening all the way through. Written as a series of chats with God and letters to and from Celie and her sister, Nettie, this book takes place over 40 year in Georgia. It highlights the terrible prejudice toward Celie by her own kind. Her life is so bad, being abused, sexually, physically and emotionally by the man she thinks is her father, and having given birth to his two children, she is married off to an equally abusive womanising husband. She is separated from her sister, Nettie, who eventually goes to Africa as a help to a black missionary and his wife. This couple have adopted Celie’s children, unbeknown to her, whose parentage is not known to the missionary couple. Nettie experiences the terrible greed and lust for land and money of the rubber planters, and also the appalling culture of scarification and FGM within the tribe with whom they live. Celie’s life only turns a corner when she meets one of the women her husband is involved with. This lady, Shug, is a strong character who encourages Celie (eventually) to take a stand and be her own person; to fight for what she has a right to – Freedom and equality within the marriage; the right to say ‘No’ and the right to have the letters her sister has been writing to her for years but she has never received. Celie has never had such love and compassion from anyone before Shug and they become intimate. This intimacy is spoken of with sincerity and compassion in the book. Eventually, all things work out okay for Celie, Nettie and Celie’s children but not before they all learn some very important lessons about bigotry, discrimination, sexual and racial relations, their history and our relationship with God.

Me gusta mucho el libro. Llegó en buen estado.

Subtil, moderne, éclairant et plein d'espoir.

Llegó en perfectas condiciones y en menos tiempo de lo esperado. El libro simplemente me conmovió profundamente. No pude soltarlo en toda la semana.