The Bluest Eye
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Overview
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.From the 1993 Nobel Prize-winner comes a novel "so charged with pain and wonder that it becomes poetry" (The New York Times). First published in 1965, The Bluest Eye is the story of a black girl who prays -- with unforeseen consequences--for her eyes to turn blue so she will be accepted.
Synopsis
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, The Bluest Eye (1970) is the first novel written by Toni Morrison. It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who 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.
John Leonard, New York Times - John Leonard
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is an inquiry into the reasons why beauty gets wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black. [Ms. Morrison's prose is] so precise, so faithful to speech, and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry I have said 'Poetry,' but The Bluest Eye is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare, and music.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Toni Morrison's classic Nobel Prize-winning work about a young African-American girl's struggle for beauty and acceptance is narrated by the excellent Ruby Dee. Morrison's brilliant tale is beautifully brought to life by Dee's dramatic, powerful voice.From the Publisher
“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.” —NewsweekJohn Leonard
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is an inquiry into the reasons why beauty gets wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black. [Ms. Morrison's prose is] so precise, so faithful to speech, and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry…I have said 'Poetry,' but The Bluest Eye is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare, and music.—John Leonard, New York Times