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Liliane
The author of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf presents a lyrical exploration of one black woman's psyche by her friends, lovers, and herself, set against racially divided Mississippi and Queens, New York.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
28 people are currently reading
695 people want to read
About the author
Ntozake Shange
80 books796 followersNtozake Shange (pronounced En-toe-ZAHK-kay SHONG-gay) was an African-American playwright, performance artist, and writer who is best known for her Obie Award winning play for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf.
Among her honors and awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, and a Pushcart Prize.
Among her honors and awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, and a Pushcart Prize.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
March 6, 2016
Masterful! This is amazing storytelling. I know that Shange is famous for For Colored Girls. But to me this is her best piece of work. Another book that I would love to see as a film.
January 11, 2012
My adult mind gives this book a 3.5, my adolescent self gives it a 5. This is how I arrived at 4 stars. The truth is, I wish I'd read Liliane as a teenager. Her broken/bad ass character is haunting, believable, loving and reckless, all qualities I both was and hoped to be in my teen years. She is a bit of a stereotype in her own ways, the crazy lost artist, but no matter, the book is so full of poetry that you can forgive such minor missteps. Every character's voice is a distinct and separate poem disguised as a monologue. Though I breezed through the book in a few long train rides, sometimes the format of the book (switching between new characters voices and observations on Liliane, interspersed with therapy dialogue) made me work a bit to understand what was happening, and I like a book that challenges me. This is a novel I'd hand to my students in a heart beat, and would recommend to teachers looking to use an intimate portrait to bolster their Civil Rights movement studies. For young women who ache, there's always Shange. She's so good at that.
September 15, 2008
Ntozake Shange always shifts something inside me. She makes me want to put on bells, feathers, and scarves and dance barefoot- to be thankful and joyful for music, movement and color.
May 19, 2020
I don’t remember the last time I read a book where I didn’t really “get it” but I still enjoyed it. • I loved #NtozakeShange’s style of AAVE, how she describes the beautiful & the terrible, her movement between characters’ voices. • the novel moves between a therapy session with artist #Liliane and chapters where family, friends, lovers, and Liliane herself share incidents throughout her life. It’s like looking close up at a quilt, not quite seeing how it fits together until you move your eye over the whole thing, new things connecting to old, themes and situations reappearing. Then you start to understand the person you’re seeing • This book is beautiful, experimental, aesthetically and stylistically refreshing.
September 6, 2022
"Hyacinthe should have laughed at those crackers portraying Longstreet, Sheridan, Custer, and Stewart, just like they'd have laughed at us, a bunch of colored girls, saying out loud that crackers not only created a country they stole from other people, but they reaped the riches of the labor of other folks they had stolen. Not only was this a thieves' paradise, but all of us, Lollie, Roxie, Hyacinthe, Liliane, and me, we were living testimony that nobody like us had ever existed before, and nobody had expected we'd be so goddamned hard to kill off." (238-239)
This is a story about a young Black woman told in an unique multi voice format where it alternates between conversations Liliane has with her psychoanalyst and chapters told from the perspectives of those who know her whether it's exes, family members or friends. I loved the structure of the novel, it's creative and allows the reader to both see different sides of Liliane and also explore different periods of her life and current events at the time. It moves from North to South, the present to the past. Liliane's world is also very Black and brown. Different class and racial backgrounds are present but there are no stories centered around white people, no chapters narrated by them. Additionally I loved that each character not only had their own impression of Liliane but also that their own personalities and stories shone through. Their stories provide a more three dimensional look at Liliane but also give them a chance to be actually realized people that I wanted to keep popping up in the story. Each character sounds different, they are wholly realized individuals. The chapter titles are also very clever, slyly making references to the content of the chapter even though most titles are indirectly referenced. I also wonder if this is one of the earliest works of Black literature to include mentions of therapy and subtly promote its usefulness. It took me a minute to understand what was occuring in the early chapters with Liliane and her psychoanalyst but gradually I grew to appreciate how these chapters contributed to the storytelling, he helped her unpack her childhood traumas and current anxieties by urging her to remember incidents she'd shoved to the back of her mind. Or pushed her to recall a story exactly the way it happened, not the way she wished it had happened. Liliane never mentions to others that she's in therapy but the very matter of fact way it's presented, for a book in the early '90s, struck me as novel. But I could be wrong! It's something I'll keep in mind.
The writing is imaginative and luscious, I love novels by poets and Shanghe's poetry background is on display here with delicious descriptions of thoughts and feelings such as, "I mean, I know I came here voluntarily. I wanted to come cause I'm coming out of my body. This is really odd. Parts of me, my feelings are streaming out of my hands and my thighs. I sense when I am walking that my thoughts are dripping down my calves from behind my knees. I am leaving puddles of myself underneath me and I can't pick myself back up, put myself back together" (pg. 80). The poetic writing is also fitting for the character of Liliane. She is an artist, a bohemian bon vivant, an intellectual, a woman who owns her sexuality. It feels completely believable that she would be closely attuned to her body and feelings and wholly able to describe them in such a lyrical and distinctive way. The freedom to flaunt your sexuality is a central theme of the story, as Liliane and her exes, talk about her passion and energy. Her exes are also not all men and she avoids labels. It's borderline stereotypical except Shanghe's writing and character development goes so much deeper than the typical artist story. Liliane's upper middle class background is also used to explore the heavy burden of the self proclaimed Talented Tenth and the rampant elitism and snobbery they displayed. Liliane's mother, S. Bliss, was similarly free spirited and artistic and this line she utters haunts me "I have never been what anybody expected, or wanted for that matter; I'm not even what I wanted" (191). There is so much painful truth in that one line about expectations society has for us and expectations we have for ourselves set against a sharp and claustrophobia inducing upper class background. Much of the book is about Liliane struggling to find herself amidst her father's elitist and benevolently sexist expectations as she realizes he held both her and her mother to an impossible, stifling standard.
LILIANE is a dreamy, sensuous, polyphonic novel about a young Black female artist pursuing new beginnings and opportunities. Liliane is now one of my favorite characters in literature: artistic, messy, romantic and somewhat selfish. Some of her decisions made me cringe and the novel can be extremely dark but I was enthralled from beginning to end. Alternating between Liliane's childhood in the '70s and the present day this is also a book that is heavy on pop culture, dropping references to musicians, artists and movies that enhanced my reading experience. She is unapologetically Black and unapologetically herself. Her story is used to probe ideas around class, race, gender, the global diaspora, sexual expression, relationships and therapy/psychoanalysis. The language and writing style is vibrant and rhythmical, this novel is simply sublime.
Additional favorite lines:
"Bliss, now you know I love you like nobody else in the world, but you can't build all this for no child, especially not a Negro child in this day and age. Why she can't even drink water some places. Plus, hear me now, if she carries on like you, she'll be dead before either one of us: me or you. How's that sit with your fancy ways and dreamin's?" (190)
“White folks got us so tangled up and wound round ourselves we can’t live without them or the idea where we can touch it. If we live like white folks don’t exist, like they don’t matter, they kill us. . . . If we act decent, they treat us like fools. If we spend our lives hating them, we look as foolish and psychotic as they do to the rest of the world.”
"Didn't anybody know you didn't haveta let any man talk like he owned you, like we owed them something. For what?" (238)
This is a story about a young Black woman told in an unique multi voice format where it alternates between conversations Liliane has with her psychoanalyst and chapters told from the perspectives of those who know her whether it's exes, family members or friends. I loved the structure of the novel, it's creative and allows the reader to both see different sides of Liliane and also explore different periods of her life and current events at the time. It moves from North to South, the present to the past. Liliane's world is also very Black and brown. Different class and racial backgrounds are present but there are no stories centered around white people, no chapters narrated by them. Additionally I loved that each character not only had their own impression of Liliane but also that their own personalities and stories shone through. Their stories provide a more three dimensional look at Liliane but also give them a chance to be actually realized people that I wanted to keep popping up in the story. Each character sounds different, they are wholly realized individuals. The chapter titles are also very clever, slyly making references to the content of the chapter even though most titles are indirectly referenced. I also wonder if this is one of the earliest works of Black literature to include mentions of therapy and subtly promote its usefulness. It took me a minute to understand what was occuring in the early chapters with Liliane and her psychoanalyst but gradually I grew to appreciate how these chapters contributed to the storytelling, he helped her unpack her childhood traumas and current anxieties by urging her to remember incidents she'd shoved to the back of her mind. Or pushed her to recall a story exactly the way it happened, not the way she wished it had happened. Liliane never mentions to others that she's in therapy but the very matter of fact way it's presented, for a book in the early '90s, struck me as novel. But I could be wrong! It's something I'll keep in mind.
The writing is imaginative and luscious, I love novels by poets and Shanghe's poetry background is on display here with delicious descriptions of thoughts and feelings such as, "I mean, I know I came here voluntarily. I wanted to come cause I'm coming out of my body. This is really odd. Parts of me, my feelings are streaming out of my hands and my thighs. I sense when I am walking that my thoughts are dripping down my calves from behind my knees. I am leaving puddles of myself underneath me and I can't pick myself back up, put myself back together" (pg. 80). The poetic writing is also fitting for the character of Liliane. She is an artist, a bohemian bon vivant, an intellectual, a woman who owns her sexuality. It feels completely believable that she would be closely attuned to her body and feelings and wholly able to describe them in such a lyrical and distinctive way. The freedom to flaunt your sexuality is a central theme of the story, as Liliane and her exes, talk about her passion and energy. Her exes are also not all men and she avoids labels. It's borderline stereotypical except Shanghe's writing and character development goes so much deeper than the typical artist story. Liliane's upper middle class background is also used to explore the heavy burden of the self proclaimed Talented Tenth and the rampant elitism and snobbery they displayed. Liliane's mother, S. Bliss, was similarly free spirited and artistic and this line she utters haunts me "I have never been what anybody expected, or wanted for that matter; I'm not even what I wanted" (191). There is so much painful truth in that one line about expectations society has for us and expectations we have for ourselves set against a sharp and claustrophobia inducing upper class background. Much of the book is about Liliane struggling to find herself amidst her father's elitist and benevolently sexist expectations as she realizes he held both her and her mother to an impossible, stifling standard.
LILIANE is a dreamy, sensuous, polyphonic novel about a young Black female artist pursuing new beginnings and opportunities. Liliane is now one of my favorite characters in literature: artistic, messy, romantic and somewhat selfish. Some of her decisions made me cringe and the novel can be extremely dark but I was enthralled from beginning to end. Alternating between Liliane's childhood in the '70s and the present day this is also a book that is heavy on pop culture, dropping references to musicians, artists and movies that enhanced my reading experience. She is unapologetically Black and unapologetically herself. Her story is used to probe ideas around class, race, gender, the global diaspora, sexual expression, relationships and therapy/psychoanalysis. The language and writing style is vibrant and rhythmical, this novel is simply sublime.
Additional favorite lines:
"Bliss, now you know I love you like nobody else in the world, but you can't build all this for no child, especially not a Negro child in this day and age. Why she can't even drink water some places. Plus, hear me now, if she carries on like you, she'll be dead before either one of us: me or you. How's that sit with your fancy ways and dreamin's?" (190)
“White folks got us so tangled up and wound round ourselves we can’t live without them or the idea where we can touch it. If we live like white folks don’t exist, like they don’t matter, they kill us. . . . If we act decent, they treat us like fools. If we spend our lives hating them, we look as foolish and psychotic as they do to the rest of the world.”
"Didn't anybody know you didn't haveta let any man talk like he owned you, like we owed them something. For what?" (238)
April 20, 2016
I first read Ntozake Shange's work as a teenager and even auditioned with a few of her monologues for entrance into the performing arts high school that I attended, and that was along time ago. So of course being move by the lyrical flow of her writing I purchased through the years a few more of her titles for my unique artist collection of books and after sitting on my shelf for a few decades I decided to give her a read. In this second go round with her novel Liliana, I realized that Ntozake has a way in writing that takes you into the mind of the insane and the extremely dysfunctional part of life. If you are familiar with Ntozake's most popular work, For Colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enough, you will find that the content that she brings forth in Liliane follows all those same themes; emotional immaturity, bad love affairs, abortion, dancing, ... Read more http://drakuabookreviews.blogspot.com/
November 4, 2012
I go to church I could be so much blood-soaked cloud and dust, scraggly blackened wood beam smoldering in my glowing flesh, so many colored buds, colored blossoms, laughed at by crackers, reported in the news: "Pieces of young colored girls gathered today in a festival of death held from Mobile to Biloxi." My mama does get on me when I talk like this. "This ain't much of anything, child. Don't you know how much worse slavery times must have been?" "No, Mama. I don't know how much worse. I truly don't."
---Ntozake Shange, Liliane
Painfully revealing of the errors in interpretation and what is lost in absence of communication.
---Ntozake Shange, Liliane
Painfully revealing of the errors in interpretation and what is lost in absence of communication.
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October 3, 2012 This book is basically telling about the life of a woman named Liliane who went back over her past in order to find herself all over again, after being choked by her ex-husband. But, the past stories that she uses are told by her allies and associates that she spent her time with most, from best friends to past lovers. In between each chapter, Liliane has a conversation with Jesus and chooses the next story to be told. Things start to slow down when her best friend, Roxie, gets killed by her husband. At the end, Liliane tells her own story and falls in love with someone all over again.
Conflict:
Conflict:
December 17, 2012
Another one of my Ntozake Shange favorites!
January 20, 2018
Shange does a brilliant job of switching between narrators while still telling a coherent story.
January 9, 2021
1994
1948-2018
This book I will need to read a second time; it is very challenging for me, both to keep track of the many friends from whose perspectives the various chapters are told, and the language used which seems not to be one I understand very well.
Surely innovative, in the chapters being interspersed with dialogs of Liliane talking with her psychotherapist.
Blurb: "Through the polyphonic voices of Liliane Lincoln's childhood friends, lovers, and conversations with her psychoanalyst, Ntozake Shange weaves the life of a remarkable young woman. Liliane Lincoln is an artist who exposes what she knows of herself to the world through her bold and colorful artwork."
Wikipedia: "The novel tells the coming-of-age story of a young Black woman, Liliane Parnell, through the numerous voices of childhood friends, family, lovers, acquaintances, conversations between Liliane and her psychoanalyst, and Liliane herself. Liliane is the daughter of a wealthy and prominent African-American judge, Lincoln Parnell, and his beautiful wife Sunday Bliss Parnell who is working towards reconciling her life as an artist in the present with both the secrets and the expectations of class ascendance from her family's past."
"Shange remarks of Liliane's character: a woman who "goes all over the world, and all over the world she is confronted with sexism"."
1948-2018
This book I will need to read a second time; it is very challenging for me, both to keep track of the many friends from whose perspectives the various chapters are told, and the language used which seems not to be one I understand very well.
Surely innovative, in the chapters being interspersed with dialogs of Liliane talking with her psychotherapist.
Blurb: "Through the polyphonic voices of Liliane Lincoln's childhood friends, lovers, and conversations with her psychoanalyst, Ntozake Shange weaves the life of a remarkable young woman. Liliane Lincoln is an artist who exposes what she knows of herself to the world through her bold and colorful artwork."
Wikipedia: "The novel tells the coming-of-age story of a young Black woman, Liliane Parnell, through the numerous voices of childhood friends, family, lovers, acquaintances, conversations between Liliane and her psychoanalyst, and Liliane herself. Liliane is the daughter of a wealthy and prominent African-American judge, Lincoln Parnell, and his beautiful wife Sunday Bliss Parnell who is working towards reconciling her life as an artist in the present with both the secrets and the expectations of class ascendance from her family's past."
"Shange remarks of Liliane's character: a woman who "goes all over the world, and all over the world she is confronted with sexism"."
April 20, 2023
I’ve read several of Ntozake Shange’s books. “Liliane” is soul-stirring, yet poetic. Liliane is an artist whose feisty, while suffering so deeply she is confused about her pain and emotions. Keeping up with each character’s point of view (whose speaking) was very challenging, initially. It’s written in a series of different points of views. As I continued to read, it became easier to identify the character. I enjoyed the characters and will remember Liliane story for a long while.
November 15, 2017
I find this book difficult to rate, I enjoyed the chapters between Liliane and her therapist, but I felt a lot of the POV chapters fell flat. This was a good, quick read, and for me a good introduction to the prose of Ntozake Shange. Looking forward to reading more by her, but I don't think this was my thing.
September 8, 2017
I read this book a few years ago and it stuck with me. I was in my twenties at the time and could deeply relate to Liliane's character and her flaws. Ntozake Shange has beautiful way of looking at characters from all angles to show their humanity. I can't say enough good things about this book.
December 15, 2019
i've got to read all her books
September 25, 2022
honestly we were so lucky to have been graced by ntozake’s words
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March 19, 2024The language is rich, lush, smooth, sensual and erotic, but my view is that she is not really saying anything. The violence of men seems to be a persistent theme in her work.
August 22, 2024
This little free library book took me by surprise! Loved the dialogue intermissions, and the last chapter left me with that breathless feeling.
April 27, 2025
liliane is a compelling character to follow. she is both enchanting and flawed. shange has a very beautiful way of writing about love and intimate relationships that shines in this book. i did like that we were viewing liliane through the eyes of others throughout this book and the crowds she runs with themselves were interesting. however, the nonlinear structure, abundance of characters and locations packed into this slim novel made for a reading experience that i found confusing at times.
February 22, 2017
Liliane, a novel by Ntozake Shange - the story is told by several characters, and they are interspersed with the dialogue of sessions the title character Liliane is having with her therapist, so the style sets it apart from other books we call 'novels' but puts it right in line with other works by Shange that use a multi-vocal approach to storytelling. I'm not finding it easy to summarize; the sections show different aspects of Liliane through her family, friends, lovers. And because they narrate, we get to see them, too, and in a different light via the therapy segments. Pretty much like all her books, I didn't want it to be over and look forward to what I'd get out of a re-read already.
February 4, 2009
Just found this randomly, but really enjoyed it. Chapters alternate between a conversation between a woman and her therapist, and biographical accounts written by various people in her life. A neat accompaniment with this woman through her journey of understanding her life. Lots of stuff about race. I liked this quote:
"I mean, I know I came here voluntarily. I wanted to come cause I'm coming out of my body. This is really odd. Parts of me, my feelings are streaming out of my hands and my thighs. I sense when I am walking that my thoughts are dripping down my calves from behind my knees. I am leaving puddles of myself underneath me and I can't pick myself back up, put myself back together." (p 80)
"I mean, I know I came here voluntarily. I wanted to come cause I'm coming out of my body. This is really odd. Parts of me, my feelings are streaming out of my hands and my thighs. I sense when I am walking that my thoughts are dripping down my calves from behind my knees. I am leaving puddles of myself underneath me and I can't pick myself back up, put myself back together." (p 80)
November 7, 2012
The conflict of this story is Liliane she doesn’t know who she really is. So she draws pictures to identify the real her. Liliane she also uses her childhood friends to help her identify who she is, they also help her with her paintings. Liliane is a lost person trying to find herself. “Well you turn down Ex’s Lovers in quiet” Liliane she was going out with a young man but she wasn’t thinking at the time and choosing correctly, and she ends up choosing the wrong guy & he abused her. That’s why she that quote.
July 3, 2008
I love this author but I had a very hard time getting through this book. I sensed it was beyond my literary understanding at the time, but the book stayed with me so that even 15 years later I still regret not appreciating it more. I know I would probably appreciate this better now in my 40s than when I read it in my 20s, so I may revisit this one in the future.
March 17, 2009
A multi voiced story. At first the way the text physically reads across the page for some of the chapters was a little distracting, but then I got really into the story.
Reading her other works (For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf and Whitewash) always left me different -- this book didn't disappoint.
Reading her other works (For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf and Whitewash) always left me different -- this book didn't disappoint.
February 11, 2008
covoluted and lovely, the deconstruction of personal myth by an amazing poet.
April 14, 2008
this my absolute favorite book.
November 10, 2008
Very provocative and full of great moments.
November 4, 2008
not so much.
August 14, 2011
I think I'm just not super-into stories of the self-discovery of exceptional women.
December 20, 2013
LITERALLYYYY MY FAVORITED BOOK
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews