I love when an author can craft a tale with an economy of words. When studying journalism, there were editing projects about how to break down a paragraph into one sentence but still retain the full meaning. Morrison may be the queen of telegraphing entire worlds and characters within as little space necessary. Someone might've written SULA as a 600-page epic, and yet, it's still epic within its <200 page proportions—perhaps moreso because of those proportions.

A book that I will likely reread in years to come, one that read fast and left me gasping trying to keep up, SULA is set in a small Ohio town called Medallion, but really centers on the hillside areas called The Bottom with a black population. Here we meet several characters, including Eva Peace, who will live on in my memory forever. And into view comes Eva's granddaughter, Sula and her friendship with Nel. The novel spans years of their lives and considers how their shared origin and diverging adulthood affected them as individuals.

I have a love for the novel that examines women's friendships, and SULA does it wonderfully. Its deft use of language against such a wide array of important subjects marks it as something truly special. There are not too many unsentimental books about this kind of friendship, so realistic and precise.