The Bluest Eye: A Novel

Toni Morrison

Jul 2007 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtlety and grace. • With a new introduction by Jacqueline Woodson.

“So precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry”—The New York Times

In Morrison’s acclaimed 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 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.

Ratings and reviews

Well .. yeah! This story starts off with a hilarious bang. The sisters (Claudia and Frieda) banter is awesome. Along with Mrs. MacTeer's funny outbursts... Laugh out loud chuckles. The story told from Claudia's perspective is perfect. That's the story I was preparing to read, boy did this book slap me across the face when other stories came to be. The stories told, flipping from one to another, leaves tons of loose ends in the book. Plenty of stories that have no point in the story. I wish this book could have remained in the story of the little girls. Chollys story was pointless. It added nothing to the story other than maybe adding reasoning to his drunken ways. Polly's story was a little more in line with the general story, but not much. I think it was a mistake to take this book away from the point of view of the children. I'm not a deep reader, so I felt like the ending was just an ending for the sake of an ending. 2.5/5. Second middle of "The Road" in a row!

I first read this for my American Lit class when I was aged fifteen, and then I returned to it quite a few years later, of my own volition, as an adult. I will likely do again, too, as I get so much more out of it from subsequent readings. It is a very poignant book, often sad and heartbreaking. Perspective is often the key to so much in life, and 'The Bluest Eye' has it by miles. It isn't an easy read – the subject matter can get overwhelming at times – but it is absolutely a worthwhile one.

Morrison depicts a story of a little girl who endures so much suffering and reflects the civil and socio-economic differences of what low poverty African-Americans experienced during the 1970's. Well-written, shocking and yet truthful.

About the author

TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.