The Bluest Eye
Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.
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Community Reviews
It's a good book, and as always Morrison really knows how to write, but it has a lot of digressions, especially towards the end where you're expecting things to wrap up in the main present day plot. I find she has a habit of just dropping tons of backstory for a character all at once, and in this book she even does that several times without initially telling you which character she is talking about. In one case it isn't even clear how he's relevant to the main characters or plot until the end of the chapter. It's just structurally not the best crafted of her books. But the overall ideas and story and characters are great as always. I'm just not sure the book is considered important based on the quality of the work on its own technical merits and the reading experience. As is the case with all novels, I think it could be better by taking a stricter editing approach and cutting it down a bit to be a tighter work of art.
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