Whilst in content, this novel is similar to The Colour Purple, Walker uses an entirely different tone and structure. The way she places focus on different characters throughout is part of the fabric she uses to discuss change, and who and how people are capable of it. The switch of focus onto Grange, who the reader, from following Brownfield’s perspective, would have assumed was written off, yet having him remain deeply complex throughout all of his lives, as it were, speaks of Walker’s serious intelligence that was involved in this nuanced portrayal of violence, toward black women by men, toward black men by white people, but also this portrayal of love. She is writing of predominantly of love, and of all the horrors that disturb, revoke and challenge it.

His wife had died believing what she had done was sinful and required death, and that what he had done required nothing but that she get out of his life. And now Grange thought with tears in his eyes of what a fool he had been. For, he said to himself, suppose I turned my back on that little motherless girl over there and then my time with some other little girl; would she understand that something beyond myself caused it? No, she would not. “And I could parade Shipleys before her from now till doomsday and she’d still want to know what’s done happened to her granddaddy’s love!”