The Bluest Eye [B1548-PB]

1994 PB Plume reprint of the 1970 original, with minor wear. One of the most challenged and banned books in the US. 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 subtlety and grace. "So precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry"-The New York Times. 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.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "The writing had me hooked immediately. The way Toni Morrison tells a story here is so hauntingly beautiful. The story itself is ugly and cruel but the words are like poetry and I found myself mesmerized by her craft."; "So so beautifully written, Morrison never misses. The story itself was horribly sad and depressive, but only because of how real it felt inside the character's head. I love how the work was structured as Claudia's/Pecola's spread-out memories, and how it all wrapped together in the end. We need more writers like this."; "I am almost ashamed to admit that this is the first Toni Morrison book I have ever read, and it certainly was not for the faint of heart. Her writing is nearly faultless, incredibly moving, and powerfully disturbing. It provided a great peek into what it might look like to walk in another's shoes. Honestly, we who are white have almost no idea what our black neighbors have endured. This sad tale was indeed very enlightening."; "This will stick with me for the rest of my life."