God Help The Child is American author Toni Morrison's eleventh novel. It was published in 2015, Before this book's publication, in April, the literary world was given a small taster of the literary feast that was to come, when The New Yorker published an extract-come-teaser of the novel, under the title of "Sweetness". God Help The Child was actually the book's third title; Morrison herself preferred her original title, "The Wrath of Children".
Morrison's narrative tells the story of a young girl with blue black skin who is rejected by her lighter-skinned parents. They divorce because of Bridie; her mother is consistently harsh and emotionally removed, convincing herself that she is merely preparing Bridie for how cruel and difficult the world will be for a girl of such dark skin. Her experience as a black woman tells her that the lighter the skin, the better and easier the life.
Morrison had announced that she was writing the book in 2014, and because of her prior body of work, it was anticipated to be one of the best novels of 2015. However, in actuality the book received rather mixed reviews. Several critics disliked the characters and felt that they were more outlines, or ideas, of characters, rather than genuine people fictionalized on a page.
Toni Morrison is widely considered to be one of the leading figures in recent American Literature. She is best known for her 1988 novel Beloved, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award. It was also turned into a movie starring Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey, reaching an even wider audience within the mainstream when it was one of the first books chosen for Oprah's Book Club. In 1998, the same year that the film was released, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
