The Bluest Eye

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 subtly and grace.
 
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.
 
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).

Ratings and reviews

At the beginning I felt it's somewhat similar to 'To Kill a Mockingbird'--a little girl talking about the end and then going back to tell how it happened. I appreciate that the book is trying to bring to the light that beauty is not just "blue eyes and blonde hair" but overall the plot and the story-telling fell through somewhere in the middle of the book.

This book has no sense of meaning! It is like saying all white are mean toward Africans. Look at Pecola, she's ruined! How does she even find the card of Soaphead Church card anyway!? If she didn't find the card then she would not go crazy. What kind of parents does she have anyway! Why can't she just run away from her parents? It is better then just staying with them anyway! How about if a young innocent child was reading this?! it would ruin their pure mind

Read this in high school and it was very different from what I usually read, but overall this was a good book. I think it has so much meaning to it b/c alot of women(girls, men, boys) have things about them that they want to change....like how this girl wants blue eyes.

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.