Recommendations
Books Like Tar Baby by Toni Morrison
For readers of the Caribbean identity novel
If you loved Tar Baby — Jadine and Son's volatile love affair on Isle des Chevaliers, Morrison's meditation on African American identity and assimilation, and the sensuous Caribbean setting — these books share the same interest in the tension between Black identity and cosmopolitan success, the same engagement with desire and ideology, and the same geographical richness.
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Buy on AmazonSong of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's breakthrough novel — Milkman Dead's search for ancestral history; the companion in her fiction about African American identity and ancestry; the essential Morrison novel companion to Tar Baby.
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Buy on AmazonBeloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's Nobel and Pulitzer-winning masterpiece — the companion in her fiction; where Tar Baby is about the tension between African American identity and assimilation, Beloved is about the roots of that identity in the traumatic history of slavery.
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Buy on AmazonTheir Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston's Harlem Renaissance masterpiece — the companion in African American women's fiction about a Black woman's quest for identity and love; Janie Crawford and Jadine Childs are companion figures across decades of African American women's fiction.
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Buy on AmazonGiovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
Baldwin's novel about an American man in Paris — the companion in American fiction about identity, European cosmopolitanism, and what it means to be formed by one culture and to try to live in another; the Paris context of Jadine's formation has its companion in Baldwin's Paris.
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Buy on AmazonPassing
by Nella Larsen
Larsen's Harlem Renaissance novel — the companion in African American literary fiction about the tensions between racial identity and assimilation into white society; Irene and Clare's dynamic is an earlier version of the tension between Jadine and Son's versions of Black identity.
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Buy on AmazonThe Beautiful and Damned
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald's novel about the Jazz Age's promise and destruction — the companion in American fiction about the generation that pursued cosmopolitan success and discovered its costs; the parallel is across racial lines but the American mythology of upward mobility Morrison is critiquing in Jadine's story is Fitzgerald's subject.
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Buy on AmazonSula
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's second novel — the companion in her fiction about African American women's friendship and the way communities define and police their members; the Bottom, Ohio community's response to Sula's refusal to conform is the companion to Son's response to Jadine's cosmopolitan flight.
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Buy on AmazonWide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
Rhys's prequel to Jane Eyre — the Caribbean companion in fiction about women defined and destroyed by the colonial world they inhabit; Isle des Chevaliers is the companion fictional Caribbean to Rhys's Coulibri in Jamaica.
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