"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

I think the heroine of the book is supposed to be Nel, because she puts up with everything life throws her way and turns the other cheek when people hurt her emotionally. It seemed that she tried to get through everything and look on the sunny side of life. Sula made different, more precarious choices, and often times paid for them dearly. Sula also took away Jude, which I mentioned before, and this is the main reason I look at Sula as being the slightly more evil of the two.

"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)..."

I didn't really like how Eva Peace's son, Plum, was doused in gasoline then set on fire by his mother and she just left and acted like she never did anything. Then later, when Hannah confronts her, she at first sort of acts like nothing happened. Then she explained, but I was still confused. 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. Then, although she never denied that she meant to land far away from her daughter, she sort of hinted at it. She talked later in the book about a dream she had then she related a red dress in the dream back to the fire that killed her daughter.

I also think every book, movie, play, musical, or short story, has to have a crazy person. In this book's case, there's more then one. Shadrack with his National Suicide Day, Eva with her random jumping out of windows and setting her son on fire, and Hannah, randomly going into the basement closet with miscellaneous men. Each one, I think though, is signifying some different question people ask about life. 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.

(4) Characters (B)-At the beginning the characters are introduced in the middle of their lives. Shadrack is returning from war and Eva is struggling to raise her family. The introduction to Sula and Nel was a more gradual, because the reader follows their entire life. I think that both Sula and Nel were static figures until the end of the book where Sula dies, and Nel has a total revelation into herself and realizes that life isn't all about being good.

(2) Plot: The plot describes the growth of two young girls into middle-aged women, and of all the incidents that occur to distance them while drawing them closer together in the same sense. Also, things that happened early in their life, such as drowning Chicken Little, came back up in conversation later on. Sula and Nel accidentally drowned Chicken Little, Nel was the calm one and I figured Sula would be because she had dealt with, and just watched, death before. 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 girls both begin growing up in two different types of households. One house was strict and religious, the other with a lack of morals and a lady in a wagon with one leg. Despite the differences in lifestyle, the girls are attracted to each other

Some common words found in the essay are:
Sula Nel, Chicken Little, Eva Peace's, Service Project, Toni Morrison, Hannah Eva, Devil Nel, Little Nel, Bottom Nel, Day Eva, sula nel, chicken little, main characters, life sula, book sula, narrator describes bottom, characters book, suicide day, people died, book narrator, national suicide day, national suicide,
Approximate Word count = 2228
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)