Is sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to get attention we do, except walk?”

The Color Purple is a historical fiction written in form of letters, which shows the life of two African-American sisters, Celie and Nettie. Celie was raped by her own father and bored two children before being married to an older man. Her marriage was also troublesome. She never got to know what the true love is.

When a women named Shug comes to her life, she starts to see things differently. She was awed by the bravery, modernity and directness of Shug and we see an amazing character growth of Celie. On the other hand, Nettie, ran from her home and luck brought her to Africa where she worked as a missionary with a family.

The writing style of Alice Walker will keep you hooked till the end as we see the struggles of African-American women, how men had all the authority and women were the mere pieces of sex object. When they see women like Shug, who dared to oppose them, they used to spread bad notions about such women. Women were only for doing household work and all the field work while men were simply proving their ‘manhood’.

This book will definitely play with your emotions. You would want to fight for women like Celie. It would inspire you to be strong and fight like Shug and Sofia. It is one of the most challenged book ever and was challenged for offensive language and being sexually explicit, which I think was all necessary for the story to portray the kind of emotions it did. If you haven’t read this book yet, I would highly recommend this. This is definitely not an easy read but definitely a worthy one.

It is not a classic for no reason.