In The Color Purple, Shug encourages Celie to re-imagine the way she thinks about God.

But when the going gets tough, do we still have control over our lives and identities, or is it all up to fate? Whether it's stress at school, trouble back home, or drama with your friends, life has a special knack for pushing us into places we'd rather not go. What is The Color Purple About and Why Should I Care? So curl up and settle down-it's about to get purple up in here. If you're ready to tackle The Color Purple's more mature and painful elements, you'll be rewarded with a powerful story about one woman's evolution from a wounded soul to a free and happy spirit. If Oprah approves, you know you're gonna like it. Steven Spielberg even turned it into a movie, starring none other than Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah. Now, we don't know about you, but any book that gets people like Nancy Grace all riled for a solid three decades must be pretty darn good. The reasons? Homosexuality, offensive language, and other sexually explicit material ( gasp!). Still, despite the undeniable impact the book has had on audiences around the world, it remains one of the most commonly banned books even today-over thirty years after being published. They don't just hand those out to anyone, you know. So moving, in fact, that the book won author Alice Walker the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 1983.

It's a happy ending to an otherwise pretty intense and moving story. Luckily, with the help of some dear friends and her own indomitable spirit, Celie ultimately grows stronger and discovers her own independence. If there's one thing that becomes clear in the first few chapters of this book, it's that sometimes life just isn't fair. It stars Celie, a poor black woman in the rural South, and follows her through about thirty years of her life-from repeated sexual abuse by her father as a young girl to even more abuse at the hands of her husband as an adult. This novel features a bit more than pictures of grapes, eggplants, and that weird McDonald's character. Sure, it gets mentioned here and there, but if you're hoping this will be a book about all things purple in the world, you're probably better off checking out the classic children's book, Purple. Spoiler alert: The Color Purple isn't actually about the color purple. Alice Walker's The Color Purple: Book Study Guide Introduction

The color purple book sparknotes