? UNDER THE LAMPLIGHT-

Ready for a heart-wrencher? Read the classic Beloved by Toni Morrison. Inspired by the life of Margaret Garner, a former slave whose tragic efforts to prevent her family from being captured eventually made headlines in 1856 and reached Morrison when she began to write this novel in the 1980s. This tale of historical fiction takes place in Cincinnati after the American Civil War, where a family of former slaves find that their home is being haunted by a malevolent spirit. As the events of the novel unfold, we watch as the spirit begins to influence Denver, the protagonist’s introverted daughter. Sethe, our heroine, is trying to discover a way to remove the spirit from their home until she finds that the being has transformed itself into a young girl, a child slightly older than Sethe’s Denver and looks very familiar. As the child assumes her place in the house and demands to be loved and cared for, Sethe slowly starts to realize who she is — or was. As the pages turn, the reader begins to see flashbacks of the past that Sethe and her family have tried to forget — a daughter that had a tragic end when her mother made the hardest choice: For her daughter to live as a slave, or to die and get her freedom. The novel provides an example of slave-fugitive narratives and serves as a reminder of the sacrifices that have often pushed people under occupation to escape their lives of entrapment.

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