Not that it’s all peaches in brandy (another Bride favorite) in YOU, GIRL land. Apparently Sweetness was wrong instead of being a cross to bear, Bride’s skin is her greatest asset. She drives a Jaguar with vanity plates and wears only white. Whenever she can, Bride reclines on silk pillows, nibbles asparagus and lobster salad, sips apple martinis, totes Louis Vuitton. “It’s for girls and women of all complexions from ebony to lemonade to milk,” Bride explains, though she seems much less interested in empowering and beautifying fellow sisters than in her job’s outsized luxury perks. Good thing Bride’s still got her career as regional manager (“that’s like being a captain”) of a small cosmetics business for which she has invented a brand called YOU, GIRL: Cosmetics for Your Personal Millennium. And besides, “our affair wasn’t all that spectacular…nothing like those double-page spreads in fashion magazines, you know, couples standing half naked in surf, looking so fierce and downright mean, their sexuality like lightning and the sky going dark to show off the shine of their skin.” “Clearly he was just using me since I had money and a crotch,” she grumbles. We encounter Bride, Sweetness’s daughter, all grown up and in the process of being dumped by some no-good mister who delivers a parting diss (“You not the woman I want”) on his way out the door. Sweetness’s chapter reads like an evil oracle the reader braces for dreadful things.īut the second chapter is so different in tone, and so astoundingly vapid, that it might belong to another book. There will also be struggle-damaged souls desperate to transcend terrible pasts-and there will be child abuse, both physical and emotional, before the novel ends.

There will be racism, specifically, that of light-skinned blacks toward dark-skinned and there will be heartache, specifically, that of a daughter spurned and belittled by her own mother. Right away, the Morrisonian themes are there.

God Help the Child by Toni Morrison