Toni Morrison Has A New Book

Mood: Thoughtful
Music: One, U2 with Mary J. Blige

She's back in the saddle again, with A Mercy. The novel takes place in a time when slavery in America was a reflection of class/status, and not of race. I find the premise fascinating. Here's more on the book:

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Ron Charles
Toni Morrison's new novel, A Mercy, makes a spellbinding companion to Beloved, her 1987 tour de force that transformed our understanding of slavery and won the Pulitzer Prize.
Her old themes rise up in A Mercy like a fever dream: the horrible sacrifice a mother makes to protect her child, the deadly vanity of benevolent slaveholders, the abandonment of a past too painful to remember. But this is a smaller, more delicate novel, a fusion of mystery, history and longing that stands alongside Beloved as a unique triumph in Morrison's body of work.
The lush poetry and amorphous structure of A Mercy reflect the story's distant setting in the mist of America's creation, when independence and the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution were still a century away. The four abandoned women at the center of this novel -- one white, one Native American and two black -- are all enslaved in some way, struggling to maintain their precarious life together on a failing farm in the late 17th century when the New World's traditions of slavery are fresh and fluid.

I plan to read it, as soon as I finish The Historian, which I'll admit is ever so softly kicking my ass.