
Tar Baby
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Narrated by:
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Alfre Woodard
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By:
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Toni Morrison
The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. Tar Baby, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones—of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of the people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black and white people.
The place is a Caribbean island. In their mansion overlooking the sea, the cultivated millionaire Valerian Street, now retired, and his pretty, younger wife, Margaret, go through rituals of living, as if in a trance. It is the black servant couple, who have been with the Streets for years—the fastidious butler, Sydney, and his strong yet remote wife—who have arranged every detail of existence to create a surface calm broken only by sudden bursts of verbal sparring between Valerian and his wife. And there is a visitor among them—a beautiful young black woman, Jadine, who is not only the servant's dazzling niece, but the protegée and friend of the Streets themselves; Jadine, who has been educated at the Sorbonne at Valerian's expense and is home now for a respite from her Paris world of fashion, film and art.
Through a season of untroubled ease, the lives of these five move with a ritualized grace until, one night, a ragged, starving black American street man breaks into the house. And, in a single moment, with Valerian's perverse decision not to call for help but instead to invite the man to sit with them and eat, everything changes. Valerian moves toward a larger abdication. Margaret's delicate and enduring deception is shattered. The butler and his wife are forced into acknowledging their illusions. And Jadine, who at first is repelled by the intruder, finds herself moving inexorably toward him--he calls himself Son; he is a kind of black man she has dreaded since childhood; uneducated, violent, contemptuous of her privilege. As Jadine and Son come together in the loving collision they have both welcomed and feared, the novel moves outward—to the Florida backwater town Son was raised in, fled from, yet cherishes; to her sleek New York; then back to the island people and their protective and entangling legends. As the lovers strive to hold and understand each other, as they experience the awful weight of the separate worlds that have formed them—she perceiving his vision of reality and of love as inimical to her freedom, he perceiving her as the classic lure, the tar baby set out to entrap him—all the mysterious elements, all the highly charged threads of the story converge. Everything that is at risk is made clear: how the conflicts and dramas wrought by social and cultural circumstances must ultimately be played out in the realm of the heart.
Once again, Toni Morrison has given us a novel of daring, fascination, and power.
©1981 Toni Morrison (P)2003 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
“Deeply perceptive. . . . Return[s] risk and mischief to the contemporary American novel.” —John Irving, The New York Times Book Review
“Arresting images, fierce intelligence, poetic language . . . One becomes entranced by Toni Morrison’s story.” —The Washington Post
“Wrenchingly good. A terrific book.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
Featured Article: 85+ Toni Morrison Quotes on Life, Love, Freedom, and Hardships
The first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison, who passed away on August 5, 2019, left behind a legacy of wisdom in her novels and essays. Her work explores topics like human nature, happiness, love, and enduring hardships, but also delves into the subject of freedom and what that has meant for African Americans. These quotes will get you through tough times, inspire you to look at yourself, and much more.
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Reader skips paragraphs!!
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I love Toni’s books!
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Love
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Classic
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Would you listen to Tar Baby again? Why?
Yes. To get a better understanding of the characters of the bookWhat other book might you compare Tar Baby to and why?
The Darkest Child by Delores Philips. Though the stories are different a couple of the characters from each books remind me of each other.What about Alfre Woodard’s performance did you like?
Her portrayal of each character, how she changes her voice for each one. She never missed a beat the story continued to flow and you knew who the character was by the change of her voice. Great Performance by her, Ms Woodard was the reason I purchased the audio book, one of my favorite actors.Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
The secret the cook had kept about the lady of the house.Great Book!
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Not sure how I feel about this one...
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Son Finding
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Hard to Read...Great to Hear!
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Love this story and the deep historical background truths of how far love will take you . To make it even better, is the stories within a story. Thank you .
Deep love
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Disappointing
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