Understanding Alice Walker is organized into four chapters: “Understanding Alice Walker: The Sign of the Family” (Chapter 1); “The Sight of the Familiar: ‘I Love Myself…’” With an ethic of care, Walker represents the interior lives of characters that are often discarded and neglected in society as evident in her early works Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. Davis illuminates Meridian’s significance in exploring the cost of survival in the fight to create a beloved community. ...Davis argues that “Meridian may be Walker’s most brilliantly conceived and realized novel” (46) despite its relative obscurity in comparison to The Color Purple.