Sula, like so many of Morrison's works, is both raw and lush. There is an exquisite peeling away of characters and places which leaves their set-upon lives tormented and ambiguous, people neither virtuous nor wicked, just people breaking and broken. And, of course, the masses of hypocrisies which surround them meanwhile.

Images here will never leave me: hands which slip, arms which open, feet that land and that do not -- the (ir)responsibility of childhoods, the desperation against aloneness, the sacrifices.

Each of our lives intersects and encapsulates; we sublimate and revise our guilts; so too does this novel work upon us, compelling us to peel back and see up close, to admit, to understand. Sula upends our own comfort even while we weep for its people.