I loved this book at first and I ultimately enjoyed it, but by the end of it I was tired of it and couldn't keep track of all the characters.

There were portions that moved almost too quickly and some portions that were too drawn out.

Several of the earliest characters lacked any kind of closure. A case in point, after following Eudora's life for I-don't-know-how-many-pages suddenly she's a minor character with a few mentions and then her death is just a mention 2 years after the fact. At least Ma Bette's funeral is chronicled with a full family gathering.

On the upside I loved the stories themselves and the way that African American history is told through these 7 generations of women.

This book is too long! It is so hard to review this book beyond that. This is an historical fiction but it is written in heavy dialect and that makes it a little exhausting. I did listen to this through my Audible subscription and I really enjoyed the speech and singing of the narrator, but even she can only carry this book so far. It’s just too long. It follows several generations of a mulatto family, but I can’t tell you the point or outcome of this book. It’s just too long and not interesting enough to pull me to the end. I gave up on it. Maybe I’ll revisit it again in the far away future. It’s just too long.

As I was getting near the end of this book, I kept thinking about how music can affect our emotions.

I enjoyed this book. It’s a multi-generational story, about a family that has music in the blood. Some of the themes in this book are abandonment, challenging mother and daughter relationships, rape, and civil rights.

Just when you get into this book, it's all chop/change and on to the next generation. None of the stories follow through and you never quite get the satisfaction of progressing through on any single story line to the end.

But, it might not even matter, since each subsequent story is a tedious repetition of a previous one. This is definitely one of those 'the daughter makes the same mistakes as the mother, and as the grandmother, and as the great-grandmother.'

I liked the idea of this book, but it was way too ambitious for a book.
if they turn it into a TV series- that will work!

Quite a powerful story; potent, enlightening and inspiring. Well told.

I hate those allegorical beginnings of so many books by black authors. But I suffered through this one and was richly rewarded, until I wasn't. The first half to two-thirds of this book is pretty good. Interesting weave of characters through history and interesting backdrop of Charleston (a city I don't know much about). After the early nineteen hundreds, though, the book goes off the rails and becomes merely a survey of black music through the twentieth century. Now whether this was due to two authors writing or the fact that Shange had a series of strokes during the writing, I don't know, but the book could have ended hundreds of pages earlier and would have been a masterpiece.

My other problems with the book? Every time someone gets raped, they get pregnant. What happened to Lizzie's dad? His disappearance drove me nuts. Oh, and particular to the book on tape version - there were errors. I got to hear the reader start reading, clear her throat, correct herself and ask for another take, not ONCE but TWICE. So sloppy!

a great epic story seven generations.