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Summary: Wanting to be accepted...
Review: This book was presented in an original and unique way'the language of the book is much different from any others I have read. Toni Morrison has a way with words that illustrates the book vividly and captures the deeper meaning behind the words. The Bluest Eye is not about the perfect traditional family, but instead about a young girl, Pecola, who is tormented by her family and schoolmates as any ugly black girl. Her only wish is to be the stereotypical beautiful American, like Shirley Temple'blond hair and blue eyes. She feels if she has blue eyes, everything in her life would be better. Claudia and Frieda MacTeer befriend Pecola and allow her to stay with them during hardships with her parents and after her father burned down their house. Claudia and Frieda remind me of my friends who stand up for me when others discriminate me because I am half Chinese. I have many friends, like Claudia and Frieda, who have defended me when others have called me names because I did not fit the mold of the perfect 'American' in their eyes. This story uses Pecola as a reminder of how humans can be malicious to others that may not fit societal standards of beauty. At the end, Pecola is violated in the worst way possible by her father and becomes crazy. When Pecola becomes crazy, she achieves her wish of having 'blue-eyes'. I encourage you to read this book to find out how Pecola gets her wish. Although the ending is sad, the message conveyed in this book is deep and meaningful'one that everyone can learn from.
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Summary: The idea of beauty
Review: I really enjoyed this novel. Morrison creates many interlocking stories that join together to create a masterpiece. Pecola's idea of beauty and her desire to be beautiful through having blue eyes creates a powerful message about the treatment and class of blacks during this time. She is considered ugly by everyone above her, and she feels the only way to change her ugliness is to have something all of the others have: Blue Eyes. This compelling story brings tears to your eyes from the treatment these young girls endured. I really liked this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Lofty message, but the delivery falls short
Review: This first novel is a brave attempt to describe the longing for happiness through beauty, as perceived by a black child in miserable circumstances. Miss Morrison links this longing to the disadvantage of race, but I think it is a desire that is universal. Ugliness, misery, poverty, and incest are not limited to a specific race. The fragmented thread of the story unfortunately took away the power of the author's message. However, Miss Morrison more than compensated readers with subsequent works like 'Beloved' and 'The Song of Solomon'.
Rating: 
Summary: hmmm
Review: Well if I had started this when I was older I might have liked it. My mother had to read it for graduate school but I didn't really know what it was about so I picked it up and read it. I was disturbed. It's well written but too graphic for my taste.
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Summary: The Bluest Eye
Review: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, is a magnificent piece. It is focused on an 11-year old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, who falls prey to the false notions of white superiority. The white community, her family and Soaphead Church promoted this notion. There are plenty of ugly things in the world and Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's abused both mentally and physically, and raped and impregnated by her own father. There's no doubt to why she think and feel ugly, she yearns to be the opposite of what she is-yearns to be a white child, she wants the blondest hair and the bluest eyes. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eyes was sad yet liberating. She goes in depth about self-hatred, which keeps her novel grasping the reader attention. In the book, she gets across a very powerful idea that is found in every society today. Although the book is written during the 1940's and most of the events that occur mirror that time period, the main idea transcends to this day and age. With a persuasive argument in mind and a poor, innocent black girl to appeal to the reader's pathos, Morrison craftily writes her story. Morrison's argument is how influential society can be on an individual and how strongly it's ideas and views are impressed upon that individual. The ideas and views that she speaks of mostly pertain to beauty and what makes an individual beautiful. This idea of beauty can turn someone's life upside down and in the end lead him or her to madness. Morrison is trying to impress upon her reader's what a negative effect society's ideas and views can have on an individual and how that individual's life is changed forever.
Toni Morrison is also the author of Sula, Paradise, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz. She has worked in publishing and has taught at various universities. Morrison is currently the Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton. Along with the Nobel Prize she received in 1993, Toni Morrison was also awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1996.
The book will have no value to you if you can't use your imagination and put yourself in Pecola shoes. You need to be open-minded to grasp the object of the book.
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Summary: Review for 3010
Review: The Bluest Eyes a novel by Toni Morrison is a tragic story that illustrates the worst things about human nature. It takes place in Ohio over a span of four seasons and depicts the struggle of a young black girl. Pecola is only eleven years old and has been throw worst hardships than most of us have gone throw our whole lives. Her father is an alcoholic and her mother is a mean abusive hag. The people in the neighborhood abuse and use her while calling her ugly repeatedly. This little girl has nobody to care for her and is persecuted by black people for being black and looking black. They call her the ugliest thing walking, because she does not measure up to beauty standard set by icons like Shirley Temple. She lives in poverty and blames herself wishing that she could have blue eyes so that people will love her. The story ends with Pecola convincing herself that she has the Bluest Eyes.
This fictional story is all too realistic and possible. Toni Morrison does an excellent job of dealing with a very sensitive topic while getting a very vivid point across. This was her first book and she wasted no time dealing with race and the horrible and lasting effects if has on people and their perception. This is an important book, however, its not a book one should choose to read for fun. The Bluest Eye is heartbreaking account of a little girl's life brought about by racism, physical and mental abuse not only by her parents but also by the entire community.
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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.
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Summary: A haunting debut
Review: Morrison uses beautiful language to describe a not so beautiful story about some not so beautiful people, at least according to a society that judges a person harshly on their looks. Symbolism is on every page, with the underlying theme of self loathing evident beneath the many changing narratives. Morrison can sometimes be pretentious, but she always leaves the reader questioning the world around them. After reading this a second time, it is easy to see why weird celebrities like Micheal Jackson can grow up to hate their own skin color so destructively. Here's a good example of how such a possibility can begin. The scene where Pecola tries to overcome her shame buying three pieces of candy is as painful and heartbreaking as any passage in a Richard Wright novel. Before Alice Walker's The Color Purple came along, this story was already out there, as part of an all too slim and overlooked genre: the black female experience. Morrison deserves awards for all her books, if only by refusing to shy away from life's brutalities. Disturbing moments in a fictional story are nothing compared to the disturbing histories of many black americans, and it's important that their lives be given a voice. In fact many voices, which Toni has always been skilled at putting to paper. She is truly a gifted talent. If you're going to write about heavy subjects, you can't gloss over them to make the reader comfortable. That would be a cop out to both the truth and the creative process. Let's hope with under less than ten published books Morrison still has more stories inside her. The human race and literature need her.
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Summary: Hated the novel, but Max Notes helped get my essay done!
Review: When I started this novel I loved it- I loved the author's writing style. It flowed. Sometimes it felt almost like poetry. But I felt hugely let down by her about a quarter of the way through. Why? Well... This novel contains 3 sex scenes, none of which make easy reading and one of which is the rape of an 11 yr old girl; it has one scene of a boy breaking a cat's back on purpose, and another of a girl poisoning a dog (followed by description of how the dog staggers about and dies a painful death).
In a novel of only around 160 pages long, I thought this cheap. It was voyeuristic. I'm not surprised that it was ignored for about 25 years. it is only in the new climate of political correctness that it has become esteemed. One reviewer told me that this was the point, that Morrison shows us the gritty, nasty, unfairness of the world.
Well if you want to know how awful the world is, read a newspaper. This was cheap shock tactics. I only finished the novel because it was a set text on my course. The MAX NOTES were a godsend, as they helped so much that I could write a successful essay without having to plough through this novel a second time. Don't buy the book unless you want nightmares or like feeling sick.
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Summary: Not for Me
Review: I understand that Toni Morrison is heralded as one of the leading African-American writers in the States. I have no doubt that much of 'The Bluest Eye' echoes the memories of African-American, even in contemporary times. The problem with 'The Bluest Eyes' for me is that it was not accesible to me as a foreigner. I found the title a crude and obvious metaphor of self-hatred due to race - and I don't mean to reduce it to just that but for a non-literary reader, it is how it appears to be. The plot and metaphors used in the novel did not engage me as a reader because I found it devoid of poetry. I did however, liked the interesting style that Morrison uses by switching to different voices. The novel could have been more sophisticated but it failed to hook me and I did not find it memorable. What I can recall is that it is filled with sorrow - and perhaps it is exactly as Morrison intended and for which, she achieved, but it did not encourage me to return to her writings. I understand that this may not be an accurate view of the novel and I can understand why it may be popular and applauded in America. However, a novel is often judged on its appeal in the way it moves the reader. Unfortunately, the style and language that Morrison employed in this novel did not capture my attention.
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