This novel was first published in 1970 and remained largely unnoticed until it won The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993
The Bluest Eye is the story of eleven year old Pecola Breedlove who yearns to be beautiful, to be noticed and to be loved. Pecola thinks if she had blue eyes like the little white girls then she will be so beautiful her parents will stop fighting and her father will stop drinking. So every night Pecola prays for blue eyes.
This is a powerfully sad story written in the most beautiful prose imaginable. Toni Morrison’s way with words almost makes it hard to concentrate on the story, so beautiful is the language.
While reading this novel I was transported to a place I’d never been, to a time when the color of your skin determined your destiny. A dark time when people lived literally hand to mouth and longed for a day when things would be better.
In Pecola Breedlove there is nothing but the day in day out misery of her existence, she longs for something to change her, change her world, make things different.
In the end things change, not in a way she wished but because people sometimes hurt each other in ways that are beyond comprehension.
Eavesdropping on the adults in this book you find that even they have no sympathy for this little lost girl with no one to love her. Some of them even blame her for the things that happen.
You will cry for Pecola and for everyone you meet in this book. They have all been touched by things that cast a dark shadow on the lives they live before they were even old enough to decide on a course for those lives.
This is a story of one little girls world and her single, lonely dream.