If there were half stars available I would definitely top this novel out at 2 1/2. I like what she was trying to do, but in the end she does way too much, makes the novel way too dense, way too spread out (each chapter is the story as told by one of the NINE main characters, so you have basically forgotten the previous chapter by the time you wade into the next one), and the whole thing (especially the metaphor of the oven in the center of town) just too heavy handed. I think maybe Morrison was trying to justify the Nobel Prize by writing some sort of Ulysses-type Southern Gothic tome, but it just doesn't work here. With some editing I think this could have been a more enjoyable book, but at the end of the day it just wasn't. It was one of the few novels I was exposed to in grad school that actually FELT like an assignment and required some real slogging through to get to the end. I doubt I'll ever even pick this one up again to thumb through it, let alone re-read it.