The Bluest Eye - (Vintage International) by Toni Morrison (Paperback)

About the Book

First published in 1970 by Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, the novel tells the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

Book Synopsis

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 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).

Review Quotes

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"So precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry." --The New York Times

"A profoundly successful work of fiction. . . . Taut and understated, harsh in its detachment, sympathetic in its truth . . . it is an experience." --The Detroit Free Press

"This story commands attention, for it contains one black girl's universe." --Newsweek

About The Author

Toni Morrison is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.