PositiveThe San Francisco Chronicle[God Help the Child] is another unflinching, gorgeously written story about the wounds of the black community: lost brothers and smothering mothers; colorism and child abuse; disavowed guilt and withheld love ... Morrison usually only grants us glimpses of the person inside this thrilling blackness, but in God Help the Child, we have frequent access to Bride’s consciousness. It is...disappointingly shallow. Morrison satirizes our own desires by making her heroine a puerile girl obsessed with her appearance, oblivious to other people and callow even in her professions of feeling ... Even with her brilliant use of counterpoint in God Help the Child, Morrison’s contemporary ditty strikes some false notes, mostly anachronisms in slang and technology.
