Sula

(1) Setting: 99% of the action takes place in the Bottom, which is actually up in the hills. I liked how they came up with the name of “The Bottom” because it’s the bottom of Heaven. I don’t think I can really relate to the town, basically because it was mainly an African-American populated, poorer income family neighborhood, and I’ve grown up in Ames and other places I’ve generally deemed as safe. The bottom to me reminded me of when I go on Appalachia Service Project and go work in the hills. That’s how I pictured the scenery. Throughout the book, the narrator describes the Bottom, the town in the Bottom named Medallion and the area in general. It sounded wooded and not populous, as if on the verge of the civilized world. There are a lot of tiny descriptions of the area that the book takes place in. Some of the descriptions are less about the scenery around them, but how the people in the town interpret life.

“Still, it was lovely up in the Bottom. After the town grew and the farm land turned into a village and the village into a town and the streets of Medallion were hot and dusty with progress, those heavy trees that sheltered the shacks up in the Bottom were wonderful to see.”

The first good description in the book is towar

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Despite the differences in lifestyle, the girls are attracted to each other and become best friends. Shadrack’s weirdness deals with the way people suffer, Eva deals with people’s sporadic decisions, and Hannah deals with people making somewhat poor choices in order to block out mental and emotional pain. It was more just a telling of events, a describing of places, and a story of a relationship throughout the girl’s life. She inwardly became depressed and pondered life and why she did or didn’t do things she always thought about. That was a weird section of the book, and I got confused. One house was strict and religious, the other with a lack of morals and a lady in a wagon with one leg. I thought this was a neat thing to have at the beginning of the book considering the rest of the book is FULL or random really weird deaths. Why if she loved her son so much, would she kill him? Another death that startled me a bit was when Hannah caught on fire and Eva threw herself out of a window to save her but landed 12 feet away. The only death Nel had experienced was that of her grandmother with the woman who used a burnt match to darken her eyebrows, which also struck me as weird.

The narrator never changes her opinion on what is going on because to me, she never really registered an opinion in the first place. Then she explained, but I was still confused. ds the beginning, when the Narrator describes the Bottom. I did think it was interesting that everyone sort of blamed the birds for Sula’s return, and vice versa.

“For two days they rode; two days of watching sleet turn to rain, turn to purple sunsets, and one night knotted on the wooden seats (their heads on folded coats). She comes back and Nel is married with children.

Approximate Word count = 2228
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)

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