Love is a disarmingly compact, unpompous book, less in love with the sound of its own metaphors than Morrison's last novel, Paradise (1998), and full of quirky, perverse characters and provocative, unfashionable ideas ... On to this relatively familiar setting, Morrison layers a lurid and intricate family history, and braids the cultural background with stories of love and hate in a narrative style influenced by García Márquez and Faulkner ... Morrison's imaginative range of identification is narrower by choice; although she would no doubt argue - and rightly - that African-American characters can speak for all humanity. But in Love, they do not; they are stubbornly bound by their own culture; and thus, while Love is certainly an accomplished novel, its perfection comes from its limitation.

Like all of Morrison's best fiction, this is a village novel. Race and racism, ancillary concerns in Love for the most part, throw the small groups she writes about back upon one another, steeping their passions. Even when the setting is contemporary, Morrison's books feel old-fashioned, set in a world where the perpetual distraction of the media hasn't diluted people's fascination with their neighbors ... What the middle-class blacks in Morrison's fiction gain in order, stability and mutual support -- no small blessing in a hostile, white-run world -- they lose in vitality, in wildness and perhaps in truth ... When passion is at its most extreme, Morrison suggests, its workings can be indistinguishable from those of ordinary heartlessness.

Keeping the mystery but losing the murk of her last novel, 1998's Paradise, Morrison reveals Cosey's story one detail at a time, alternating perspectives among those who knew him–people who, for all his contradictions and disappointments, invariably tend to have loved him, as well. The world he created is both a starting point and a final destination for Morrison's intimately drawn characters ... while they can't choose the past from which they've emerged, Morrison offers them one clear choice: Make peace with what's come before, or remain forever haunted.

This life-and-death brand of jealousy is everywhere in Love, the title of which grows more layered as one reads deeper. The love Morrison writes of both warms and devours, and her characters have yet to find the balance between the two. As a result, the language is taut, but passionate, full of spoken idioms and the whirl and whoosh of hurricane weather, which ravages the part of Florida where the novel unfolds ... Rife with flashbacks and L's teeth-sucking voiceovers, Love has a structure to match its complex language. Information leaks out like clues in a murder case; it's not until some time into the book that the characters' precise roles come clear, a deliberate strategy.

With Morrison's characteristic flashbacks, time-shifts and multiple points of view, Love unearths the secret, tangled histories of those who inhabited the Cosey resort before, during and after the civil rights movement ... Interpreting the will is a key theme: fragments of dislodged memory constantly force a re-evaluation of personal and national history, and of Cosey himself, who is both admirable and despicable ... Morrison exposes the instability of the houses men build from their dreams, destroyed by the passions of their inhabitants, living and dead ... The stylistic stripping away of love leaves this novel lacking in the sustained intensity of The Bluest Eye or Beloved. But Morrison compellingly exploits the silences to reveal the possibility - and necessity - of linguistic transparency ... Love's power lies in the luminosity and energy of its poetic images, set off against the narrative obscurity and laced with horror and beauty.

At times, working out the precise links between them is tough going; Morrison’s trademark poetic prose, rhythmic and sensuous but frequently opaque, slides off the soap-opera situations she describes without giving the reader much of a clue as to what is really going on ... This level of complication is often a distraction ... It is a story told with Morrison’s characteristic meandering, full of flashbacks and time shifts, jumps in point of view and lyrical descriptions that edge, on occasion, uncomfortably close to purpleness ... One of the side effects of the narrative’s hectic tone is that Morrison’s other themes, such as May’s slide into paranoia as the civil unrest associated with desegregation increases, seem oddly out of place, especially when the author slips in capsule history lessons in a factual and radically different manner ... Morrison’s ability to portray the insinuating and corrosive nature of betrayal is impressive ... That men are deceivers ever is too slender a moral to support the weight of what is at times an affecting and absorbing novel, but one that ultimately falls short of its author’s undoubtedly powerful capacity for telling tales.

...the book succeeds both as an entertainment and a moral tale ... The secrets of the past permeate this story like the heavy sweet scent of southern citrus flowers ... In this beautifully told tale, the author prompts readers to value moral choices, yet never to discount the power of love or temptation.

While the story is written in the third-person, L's segments are in first-person and italics, making the story easier to follow. Sometimes Morrison's writing can be challenging to navigate, but it's one of the things that make her writing so engaging ... Love is a beautifully executed piece of work, even down to it's red-wine colored cover and elegant gold lettering. It finishes on a powerful and surprising note, reminding me of Morrison's distinct talent for hiding clues in plain sight and keeping key facts under wraps until the last minute ... Morrison adds yet another brilliant classic to her collection.

In lyrical flashbacks, Morrison slowly, teasingly reveals the glories and horrors of the past—Cosey's suspicious death, the provenance of his money, the vicious fight over his coffin, his disputed will. Even more carefully, she unveils the women in Cosey's life ... Morrison has crafted a gorgeous, stately novel whose mysteries are gradually unearthed, while Cosey, its axis, a man ;ripped, like the rest of us, by wrath and love,' remains deliberately in shadow, even as his family burns brightly, terribly around him.

Incorporating elements from earlier Morrison novels (notably Jazz, Paradise, and Sula), Love is an elegantly shaped epic of infatuation, enslavement, and liberation: a rich symbolic mystery that grows steadily more eloquent and disturbing as its meanings clarify and grip the reader ... One of Morrison’s finest, and a heartening return to Nobel–worthy form.