The Bluest Eye

A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK

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).