Rating: 
Summary: Amazing- Author of "BrainChild": Visions of a Blind Poet"
Review: No one writes a novel like Toni Morrison. No one. Her descriptive style is incomparable. The clever narrative pulls you in from the start. The language is beautiful. "The Bluest Eye" is a novel with many intricate stories that all intertwine and read more like poetry than anything else.The book's main character, Pecola Breedlove, is a poor, dark skinned, black child. She is considered to be ugly, and she is teased and ridiculed by most of the people that she comes into contact with. She sees that society's image of what beautiful looks like does not look like her. While society merely tolerates her, it warmly embraces it's beautiful people. The beautiful people had money, dressed nicely, and typically had white skin and blue eyes. Even a light skinned black girl with pretty clothes and green eyes was accepted in society as being beautiful. Pecola equated this acceptance into society with love. Perhaps if she had blue eyes, the bluest eyes, then she too, would be loved... What was unthinkable at the time the book was written is possible now. One CAN buy colored contact lenses, change one's hair length and color, and even bleach one's skin if one wants to. There are still many people out there who are being made to feel like Pecola did. "The Bluest Eye" invites us to not only feel sorry for poor Pecola and people like her, but also to examine our own views as well.
Rating:
Summary: The best book I've read in the last two years!
Review: The Bluest Eye is clearly the most poignant, the most insightfully written novel I've read in a long, long time. Everything came together in it but I'm not sure why or how. Its transitions are choppy, its characters are caricatures and its action is stifling, but it works and says what it needs to say despite its flaws.
I'm reminded of Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" where everything worked, despite an appalling lack of personal pronouns, or Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe", which worked despite impossibly stilted language, or Orwell's "1984", which worked despite its nihilistic stereotypes.
Rating: 
Summary: Through Pecola's Blue Eyes...
Review: The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison?s first novel, is a spectacular rendition of what our world truly thinks about appearance. With very vivid detail and meaningful language, Morrison puts her soul out there for everyone to see. Morrison opened up my eyes to the painful outcomes our society can create. This book kept me turning the pages so I could see what happened next. Morrision?s use of language made me feel like I was right there beside each character listening to all their stories. Morrision?s organization of the book sets you up to the ultimate understanding at the end of the book. As a lover of fiction this is a novel that I will never forget. It offers us poetic language and striking detail that takes us on a journey through life.
This novel tells us the story of young Pecola Breedlove who desperately yearns for blue eyes to gain acceptance and love. Everyone torments this young, African American girl, in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio because she is unsightly and does not look like the symbol of beauty, which is blond hair and blue eyes. Pecola lives in an abandoned store and has a very disturbed home life. Her drunken father is very abusive, her mother is a strong woman, but is in love with the symbol of beauty and her brother always seems to run away. Each of these characters has a devastating effect on Pecola?s destruction on her quest for blue eyes. Pecola?s life changes profoundly for the worse. She is inevitably shattered by the negative thoughts of people all around her and destroyed by the emotional and sexual abuse from her family.
This novel expresses some serious themes that are present in our society today. Morrision presents to us the notion of black self-hatred and what society does to people who want to be beautiful. It hurts me to know that the only thing Pecola prayed for was blue eyes. Pecola just wanted to be loved and capture the attention her family was not providing her with. This is a very good book to read if you are feeling down about your appearance because it makes you realize that you cannot go by what society thinks is beautiful, you have to go by what is on the inside. Pecola was a beautiful girl on the inside but nobody realized that because everyone was too caught up with what beauty is on the outside. Pecola hated herself because she wanted to be just like Shirley Temple and all the grown-ups emphasized this too. The lesson in this story is people need to be true to themselves and know who they really are and not be caught in the deadly trap of the media or society.
If you like serious, touching, make you want to cry, fiction novels, then this is the book for you. I think anyone can learn something from its deep and somewhat hidden themes. This novel touched me and made me want to go find Pecola and give her a big hug and say to her ?I will be your friend.? This novel threw me into a whirlwind of different emotions. At times I just wanted to cry and at other times I was completely raging. There were times when I wanted to scream at the characters and there were times where I just wanted to put myself in Pecola?s head and defend her and make things right. This book should reveal to you how bad things can get in our society and that we need to stop them from happening. I think that this is what Morrison was trying to get across. Everyone needs to realize these things and then we can work on changing them for the better.
Rating:
Summary: What I Think
Review: The book The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is such a depressing and sad book that makes it very good and interesting. I recommend this book because it can make a person realize how physical appearance can mean so much to one person. This book relates to reality in different ways, such as incidents of being raped by a family member does happen, and some people aren't satisfied with their looks. It can change how a person behaves and treats another because of their appearance and race. This book can help you understand how a person that is being convinced that he/she is ugly feels. It's sad because there are people in this world that long so much to become pretty, but I believe that each person is beautiful in their own way.
I liked this book because it relates to situations that actually happen in the outside world. Toni Morrison has described the hardships and problems Pecola faced just because she's black and physically unattractive. People in this world do get treated unequal and different just because of their race and how they look like. It is less likely that people who have better features are being teased and made fun of.
I have a friend who always thought she was ugly because she thinks she's fat. She'll be down and upset about how sometimes guys treat her different from other girls and sometimes they would call her mean names. But she has a super-great personality and that just makes up for everything.
Another reason I liked this book is because Toni Morrison seem to describe Pecola as a strong person. Even after that horrible incident she went through, she still kept herself alive and lived on. This part of this character made me realize it's not easy to live with something like this and always being teased. Being laughed at and unaccepted is hard and painful. Also, this character teaches me to not give up so easily when difficult situations occur.
Overall, I think The Bluest Eye is an outstanding novel that I highly recommend. It's not too long and it easy to understand. Not only this book have a sad and tragic story that makes it good, it can teach a person something valuable.
Rating: 
Summary: The Bluest Eye
Review: This book is about a girl named, Pecola. She lives with her father and mother, and her younger brother, Sammy. Her father is a drunk. He abuses her mother every night he comes home drunk. And her little brother, Sammy, runs away a lot. In the year of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom, Pecola's life does change, in a painful and devastating way. Pecola wishes that she had blue eyes like the white girls. She thinks that if she had blue eyes, that people would look at her differently, in a good way. And she thinks that she would look at things in a better way. But in the mean time, she still sees herself as being ugly. By the way the grocer looks at her, and how the young black boys make fun of her. And also how the light skinned girl befriends her, but yet still makes fun of her. In my opinion, this story is depressing. So i wouldnt recommend this book to a person that doesnt like being depressed. I personally liked the book because I like books that have racial conflicts in them. And this story mainly deals with racial conflicts.
Rating:
Summary: Awakening
Review: This novel was the first Morrison book I read, and I was amazed at how complex she could be in a pool of simplicity. Very well written, deeply felt, and thought provoking. "The bluest eye" is certainly a masterpeice in it's own right.
Rating:
Summary: A literary masterpiece!
Review: Toni Morrison is one of the best fiction writers of this era, and she has proved it again and again. The Bluest Eye, Morrison's first novel, is a rich and heart-wrenching story with language so exquisite and beautiful that moved me in many ways. The story is about Pecola, a girl whose only dream is to have blue eyes. Her perception of beauty is somewhat deluded, but that's the sad reality African Americans have endured for decades. The novel emphasizes self-hatred, but the focus in the story is not how one perceives one's beauty, but rather how others perceive it. The secondary characters are essentially important in the novel. Pecola, the focal character, is not quite as developed as the others. I think Morrison wanted the reader to comprehend other people's perception of Pecola's beauty -- or lack thereof. It is sort of an outsider looking in type of thing. Pecola's story is both tragic and thought provoking. One might wonder: how do I perceive beauty? Is beauty really in the eyes of the beholder? This is -- without a stretch of doubt -- a thinker's novel. Oprah has picked an excellent book. Toni Morrison is a gifted storyteller. I strongly urge to read this book!
|
