Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye
The Bluest Eye
Author: Toni Morrison
Genre: Literature & Fiction
Book Type: Paperback
joann avatar reviewed on + 400 more book reviews


Toni Morrison uses language so beautifully! This is a story that needs to be read over and over again.
Young Pecola Breedlove really believes that in order to be considered beautiful, she would have to have blue eyes. Being black, she knows that she is considered ugly in most eyes. Everything and everyone around her says that she is not as good as white little girls with blonde hair and blue eyes.
"Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way."

Toni Morrison is gifted with her language.