The Bluest Eye

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 best-selling 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).

Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 12/28/1993
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.64lbs
Size: 7.55h x 5.28w x 0.83d
ISBN: 9780375411557

Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 5.2
Point Value: 8
Interest Level: Upper Grade
Quiz #/Name: 36938 / Bluest Eye


Review Citation(s):
Essence 08/01/2011 pg. 85
Essence 02/01/2011 pg. 168
Entertainment Weekly 06/27/2014 pg. 23

About the Author
Toni Morrison has worked in publishing and has taught at various universities, including Yale, Rutgers, and the State University of New York at Albany as the Schweitzer Chair. She is currently Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1996.