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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this book changed my world view and helped me to understand why Black was not considered Beautiful…… helped me enhance my self esteem and see myself outside of an European perspective
Her writing was magical.
You know how a musician performs a solo? The spotlight is on them, and sometimes it’s like they’re not following any written notes in the song, but are using a freestyle form of artistic interpretation? She was performing a solo here, playing with words like notes in a song, the rhythm and tune of it so appealing.
What …
he Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s first novel. Although it did not achieve critical or commercial success upon its original publication in 1970, it is now regarded as a masterpiece in many literary circles. It is an important work in Morrison’s oeuvre and also a seminal novel of our times. Set in Morrison’s hometown of Lorraine, Ohio in the 1940s, …
Toni Morrison is a tremendous writer who really makes me think, and this book was no exception. The details of the story are absolutely tragic- a young girl is raped by her father and bears his baby, who dies. Meanwhile, she’s so full of self-hatred she wishes for blue eyes, which she comes to believe she’s been given. The writing in this book …
If you read only one Toni Morrison book, make it this one. A beautifully written novel on racism and what it means to be a young black girl. Written during the 1960’s, the height of the civil rights movement and a time when many black men were being acclaimed for their writing. This, a fresh, female voice on being black in White America where …
This is a book which tests every fiber of your soul. A book specific to a certain historical time and place. It’s setting painful beyond belief, Pecola’s dealt cards of life too excruciating to absorb. Yet, Morrison makes the reader go there. She makes us taste the full extent of the bitterness, focusing on the condition of the most vulnerable …
The Bluest Eye is my favorite Toni Morrison book. I’ve read it at least ten times and always find more joy with each turn of the page.
What a compelling and tragic book. The writing is so beautiful it could be poetry. There is no author who can craft a story so artistically!
This book was heartbreaking. Getting inside the mind of a broken child and seeing the world through her eyes, viewing the devastating effects of racism on a child’s psyche had me questioning everything I thought knew about life and society and race. This book is timeless, still very relevant today. Especially relevant today.
famous author but I was unable to read it. just not my style.
“The Bluest Eye” is told through the eyes of of girls growing up in a brutal, uncaring, violent world, abandoned emotionally, intellectually, socially, physically and morally by the adults around them. They’re left in ignorance and punished and blamed for not knowing better. They’re able to assess the faults of their elders and yet mimic them in …
This is a tough book to read. Very straightforward – nothing minced. It’s underlying theme is how people of color view each other.
I don’t usually read a lot of fiction but I’ve been wanting to introduce more of it to my TBR. And Toni Morrison is spoken of so highly, this was an easy choice.
However it was not an easy read – it was heavy, gritty, arduous, with an acute sense of urgency and desperation woven through it. Her descriptions of unfamiliar and uncomfortable …
Excellent book. Wept for three days.
It’s authored by Toni Morrison…what more needs to be said?
Racist in it’s self
Toni Morrison at her best!
The Bluest Eye, nothing short of a masterpiece. A page-turner from beginning to end. If I could give this book 6 stars I would. A book you will never forget. I feel blessed in this lifetime to have read Toni Morrison’s work, but especially The Bluest Eye.5/5++ and more.
Comparison: when Whitney Huston’s amazing voice fills a room, the Angels in …
I read this when it first was published, way back when!
I struggled with this book. The book opens as if reading an old Dick and Jane story, you know, the ones that many of us learned how to read in the first grade with those repetitive sing-song sentences of an idyllic family. A white family. The Bluest Eye is starkly written and at times difficult to grasp because of the vernacular used by Toni …