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In the hills above the valley town of Medallion, Ohio is a small neighborhood known as the Bottom where black residents form a tight-knit community. They are united in their understanding of discrimination and their experience with racial oppression. The Bottom is home to Nel Wright and Sula Peace, two girls whose friendship is solidified by the burden of a horrendous secret. Once grown, they remain guardians of that secret, but an act of betrayal threatens to terminate their friendship forever.

White people lived on the rich valley floor of that little river town in Ohio, and the blacks populated the hills above it, taking small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks.

Though Sula posits to be the story of two women, Nel and Sula don't take center stage until roughly fifty pages into the book. Prior to their time in the limelight, the book reads like a collection of character studies, which provides backstory of family history that lays the foundation for the type of drastically different women Nel and Sula each grow up to be.

Opulent language is regularly employed to describe the setting and character attributes:

Then summer came. A summer limp with the weight of blossomed things. Heavy sunflowers weeping over fences, iris curling and browning at the edges far away from their purple hearts; ears of corn letting their auburn hair wind down their stalks. And the boys. The beautiful boys who dotted the landscape like jewels, split the air with their shouts in the field, and thickened the river with their shining wet backs.

Her voice trailed, dipped and bowed; she gave a chord of the simplest words. Nobody, but nobody, could say "hey sugar" like Hannah. When he heard it, the man tipped his hat down a little over his eyes, hoisted his trousers and thought about the hollow place at the base of her throat.

Young Nel is raised in an environment that stifles the glowing qualities of her personality, yet she aspires to be wonderful.

Only with Sula did that quality have free reign, but their friendship was so close, they themselves had difficulty distinguishing one's thoughts from the other's.

As a grown woman, Nel is an accepted figure in the community, content with the status quo and the confines of a life as mother and wife. Young Sula, by stark contrast, enjoys the neatness of Nel's parents' house and finds it a comforting opposite to the dirty, cluttered conditions of her own home where her mother - known around town for being loose with men - adheres to a lax method of parenting. As an adult, Sula challenges the status quo with her anarchistic ways, free of the rules for women established by men, making Sula - first and foremost - a study of an outlaw woman disrupting the harmony of a unified neighborhood and tragically injuring a lifelong friendship.

They said that Sula slept with white men. it may not have been true, but it certainly could have been. She was obviously capable of it. In any case, all minds were closed to her when that word was passed around.

Towards the end of the book, the story shifts without preamble from a third person to a first person narrative for just a few pages. It's likely this was a strategic move, enacted by the author to emphasize a character's deep sense of betrayal, but the sudden and unexpected shift was initially jarring. Once oriented, the scene does allow for a more intimate experience of betrayal as told through the eyes of a character via a first person narrative.

Coming full circle, the book concludes nicely by deferring to the characters introduced in its opening pages.

With only limited time devoted to its two leading characters, Sula is a tragic portrait of a woman breaking societal rules and suffering the grievous consequences of her actions.
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My deepest gratitude to for providing a free with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

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