Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison powerfully examines our obsession with beauty and conformity—and asks questions about race, class, and gender with her characteristic subtly and grace. In Morrison’s bestselling first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she … blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Here, Morrison’s writing is “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry” (The New York Times).
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“Nuns go by as quiet as lust…” That partial first line says so much about Toni Morrison’s skill as a writer. Only she could capture a sleepy fall evening in a quiet little town. Of course a lot more happens in this book. The line serves as a marker of what’s to come for Pecola Breedlove’s life.
A Morrison classic. Unparralled
Never to be forgotten !!
You can’t get any realer than Toni! Most of what she writes is touching and soul grabbing. This was a beautifully, honest piece of work.
In my view all should read and ponder this book.
I absolutely LOVE this book! It gave me great insight into a world I know very little about, and am thankful to have a new perspective on it. Thank you Toni Morrison!
I always like a Toni Morrison book. This was no exception. I love her characters.
Beautifully written!
I think this is Morrison’s best book. Characters are wonderfully drawn.
It is apparent Toni Morrison is an accomplished storyteller. As much as I read, this is my first Toni Morrison. I couldn’t read it all the way through. Her style in this book wasn’t to my liking. Describe the surroundings, tell the outcome and then go back and tell the story.
Her success proves this is just my opinion. Everyone I know likes her …
This is the story of an African American girl named Pecola who just wanted to have blue eyes like the other little girls she sees. She is a very poor girl in the 1940s with a family whose father drinks too much, and her mother is too quick to beat her over the smallest things. The story tells of the life she has been dealt.
I liked this book …
Just a really fantastic read. Reminding any African American woman of some of the award, embarrassing, moments I think we all have faced before our transition into becoming the women to be remembered by those moments we wanted to forget!!!