The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye

A Novel

Toni Morrison

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group · Print & ebook · May 8, 2007

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME • 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. • With a new introduction by Jacqueline Woodson. “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.

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Who it’s for
For readers interested in beauty standards and conformity
Themes
Beauty standards and conformity, Race, class, and gender, Yearning and tragedy
Genres
Black Fiction, Coming-of-Age, Literary Fiction

About this book

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME • 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. • With a new introduction by Jacqueline Woodson.

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“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.

Who it’s for

  • For readers interested in beauty standards and conformity
  • For readers exploring race, class, and gender

Where it sits

Literary Fiction47%
Black Fiction46%
Coming-of-Age45%

Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.

Publisher categories

  • Literary Fiction
  • Coming-of-Age
  • Black Fiction
Authors
Toni Morrison
Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published
May 8, 2007
Format
Print & ebook
Theme
Beauty standards and conformity · Race, class, and gender · Yearning and tragedy
Reading lane
Literary Fiction