The Colour Purple by Alice Walker

Title: The Colour Purple
Author: Alice Walker
Pages: 295
Genre: Historical, Classic, Feminist
Book Description:
Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self.

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My Opinion:
This book follows an epistolary structure in which it's written in letters addressed to important people in the protagonist's life. It tackles themes such as race, feminism and independence.

The first thing I noticed and enjoyed was the graphology. This was written as if the characters were speaking aloud (phonetically) which is quite unusual, however this helped me picture the geographical location in which the novel was set as well as develop my own image of the characters and their voices. Similar to this, there were no speech marks, which was difficult at first but by the end I was accustomed to this structure.

I loved the characters in this novel. There was such a wonderful level of character progression from all of the people, however the one character that positively changed the most was 'Mister.' At the beginning he was someone I very much disliked for his abuse and disrespectfulness towards the women in his life, but by the end it was clear that he recognised these mistakes and had changed. This was really powerful and I loved following this aspect of the protagonist's journey.

Whilst the story line was very sad and had many heartbreaking scenes, there was a happy ending which was lovely and made me smile. I liked seeing the good come from everything negative in the novel, so the ending was one of my favourite parts.

Overall this is an important novel due to the themes it explores and brings light to. I really enjoyed this despite the sad and difficult topic included here, such as rape and physical abuse. I felt like there's a lot of deeper or analytical meaning behind a lot of the novel and this is something I'm interested to explore further!

Favourite Quotes:

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it

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Time moves slowly, but passes quickly

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Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly

Rating ★★★★★

5 out of 5 stars 

This book was so well regarded that a film adaptation was created, directed by Stephen Speilberg and staring Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey! It won many awards and after reading the book I watched this to see how well it compared. It was very close to the novel which was fantastic. It's so sad and I cried my eyes out the entire way through, but there were some funny scenes and insanely good acting! Definitely recommend this film; below is the trailer:

 Next book I'm going to review:
The Whispering Road by Livi Michael