Book Review - The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison.

This small novel, Winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the story of an 11-year old black girl in America, Pecula Breedlove. Her love for blonde, blue-eyed children is so great that she prays constantly for her eyes to turn blue -- so others would look at her and admire her. She feels she is ugly and that no one likes her. Children won't sit by her in school, and she has few friends. If only her eyes would be blue she would be loved and admired…she thinks.

She has no love at home, with her father a drunkard and wife-beater, her mother a strange sort of woman with strange friends. In fact, the book itself seemed strange to me when I began reading it. But "strange" is not what one calls a Nobel Prize book! I soon found it most unique, different, and at times most creatively written, as: "Hereisthehouseitisgreenandwhiteithasareddooritisverypretty…" There are escapades that Pecula and her black friends are involved in, pages of conflicts between blacks and whites depicting stereotype racial patterns, colloquial language at times, such as: "What's she gone do? The mama?" "Keep on like she been, I reckon. He taken off."--(after a friend discovers that Pecula, then 12, is pregnant, having been raped by her father.)

The book is a bit raw at times, and puzzling. The author ends with an 8-page "Afterward" that explains some of what could puzzle the reader. A review in the New York Times offers the comment that "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. (Her) prose is so precious, so faithful to speech, and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry… but it is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare, and music." I invite you to read the book and see what you think.