Beloved ★★★★★

8:55 am 7 September 2019

This story is so full of rage and love and pain and grief, and I can’t do it justice with a review, except to say that it broke my heart and I am a little different for having read it.

Hardcover version. This is one of those books that is absolutely not suited to audio, at least on the first reading, because the nonlinear storyline and shifting perspectives and sometimes non-standard syntax make it very difficult to follow in that format. Even reading the text version, I struggled to understand what was going on at times, and I occasionally had to stop to look up some of the references. But it was absolutely worth the work.

I read this book for the Booklikes Halloween Bingo 2019, for the square Ghost Stories: Any story involving ghosts or hauntings - includes haunted houses. Beloved features a vengeful ghost, a haunted house, and people who are haunted in every sense of the word.