Book of the Month: Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison Critical Assessment “Thanks to this narrative method and Ms. Morrison's magisterial yet sensuous prose, ''Beloved'' possesses the heightened power and resonance of myth - its characters, like those in opera or Greek drama, seem larger than life and their actions, too, tend to strike us as enactments of ancient rituals and passions. To describe ''Beloved'' only in these terms, however, is to diminish its immediacy, for the novel also remains precisely grounded in an American reality -the reality of black history as experienced in the wake of the Civil War. [...]