Toni Morrison’s “God Help the Child” (2015) as "thorny, problematic, and difficult to love”

At the end of "Yes, Pain, But What Else?: Racial Liberalism and Late-Style Morrison" (2023), Melanie Abeygunawardana writes that Toni Morrison's "God Help the Child" (2015) is "thorny, problematic, and difficult to love." Such a judgment seems more like journalistic reviewing than literary scholarship; it offers not an interpretation of the novel but a description of the experience of reading it. In a review, such a claim needs no supporting evidence; it is implicitly the reviewer's experience. Especially as it was not my experience when reading "God Help the Child", I'll ask my students tomorrow, in our first session on the novel, whether their experience of the book was like Abeygunawardana's. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 8 May 2023)