Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Readalikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Apr 2000, 224 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2000, 215 pages
The story a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others. First published 1970; won the 1993 Nobel Prize. Republished 2000.
The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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. Selected as Oprah Winfrey's April 2000 Book of the Month. Republished by Random House in April 2000
Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men and sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel. Rosemary Villanucci, our next-door friend who lives above her father's cafe, sits in a 1939 Buick eating bread and butter. She rolls down the window to tell my sister Frieda and me that we can't come in. We stare at her, wanting her bread, but more than that wanting to poke the arrogance out of her eyes and smash the pride of ownership that curls her chewing mouth. When she comes out of the car we will beat her up, make red marks on her white skin, and she will cry and ask us do we want her to pull her pants down. We will say no. We don't know what we should feel or do if she does, but whenever she asks us, we know she is offering us something precious and that our own pride must be asserted by refusing to accept.
School has started, and Frieda and I get new brown stockings and cod-liver oil. Grown-ups talk in tired, edgy voices about Zick's Coal Company and take us ...
If you liked The Bluest Eye, try these:
by John Hart
Published 2008
Read ReviewsAfter being narrowly acquitted of a murder charge, Adam Chase is hounded out of the only home he’s ever known, exiled for a sin he did not commit. For five long years he disappears. Now he’s back and nobody knows why, not his family or the cops, not the enemies he left behind.
by Edward P. Jones
Published 2007
Read ReviewsIn fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, five of which have been published in The New Yorker, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer than ever
Darling Days
by iO Tillett Wright
The Tea Planter's Wife
by Dinah Jefferies
An utterly engrossing, compulsive page-turner set in 1920s Ceylon.
An intoxicatingly vivid portrait of colonial Kenya and its privileged inhabitants.
About the book
Blood at the Root
"A gripping, timely, and important examination of American racism."
- PW Starred Review
Visitors can view some of BookBrowse for free. Full access is for members only.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends books that we believe to be best in class. Books that will whisk you to faraway places and times, that will expand your mind and challenge you -- the kinds of books you just can't wait to tell your friends about.
Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info & giveaways by email.
