The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Bluest Eye
Book Review: A very powerful and life changing novel.
Summary: 4 Stars
The way Toni Morrison writes THE BLUEST EYE,is very powerfuland touching. I like that in a book. It was very hard for me tobelieve children were treated in a way that they were afraid to live. You really get to see and feel how the pain Pecola, her friends, and family had to go through affected their lives. I recommend this book to anyone who likes to read very powerful real life stories.Book Review: A wonder..
Summary: 4 Stars
Although many of her novels can be complicated, Toni Morrison's Bluest Novel is very simply put. However, your thought may be complicated relating to the story. Explaining the struggle a little black girl faces when she decides she wants her eyes to be blue, Toni depicts a struggle that everyone faces at some point in their lives, striving for the impossible against all odds, and then having to come to an compromise. We can be our own worst enemy and our most encouraging supporter all at the same timeBook Review: A worthy predecessor to Beloved
Summary: 5 Stars
I can understand Morrison's dissatisfaction as an artist with this book, as it is less mature than her later works, but I myself feel no disappointment towards it. I was interested in this book because I *loved* Beloved. I was curious to see whether Morrison's earlier novels worked on so many levels. I was pleasantly surprised. I guess nothing can live up to Beloved, but I found this as poetic, lyrical, and emotionally wrought as Beloved. I guess it would have been better for me if I hadn't read it just to "compare," but what's done is done. Morrison's prose, in fact, was just as evocative in the 1970s. The story, which could so easily have been transformed into a sordid tabloid-esque travesty a la VC Andrews, is done tastefully (as much so as any tale of incest & poverty can be). In a society as "look-ist" as ours, the Breedloves -- for this is their story, not just Pecola's-- is as relevant as any: sadly, in America, beauty can make or break a soul, even if they have the bluest of blue eyes.Book Review: Actually 1/2 star for Bluest Eye
Summary: 1 Stars
I'm sorry, but I rate this book 1/2 star, and I am being overly generous at that. It is about the most jumbled up mess of a book I have ever read. Half the time I didn't even know what character they were writing about until I was well into the chapter. Phooey!Book Review: African American Women and How They See Themselves
Summary: 4 Stars
African American Women and How They See Themselves(A critical review of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye)
One of Toni Morrison's greatest works is The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize winning author and has written novels on African Americans and their position in America for several years. The Bluest Eye in particular, depicts how African American women see themselves and how they see white women.
Toni Morrison tells the story through a character named Claudia MacTeer. Claudia is very young while she tells the story of herself, her sister Frieda, Pauline and Cholly Breedlove, and most of all, Pecola Breedlove. As she grows older, her realization of Pecola's terrible fate grows and her empathy for her fills the reader with the same empathy.
Claudia is perfect for the narrator because she is both young and open-minded. Although she is unsure of whether her view is correct, her view seems more correct because her mind is not filled with the corruption of the other characters. Claudia, unlike the other black women in the story, is very comfortable with who she is. She likes how she looks, and instead of adoring Shirley Temple cups and cute, little, white baby dolls like Frieda and Pecola; she despises them, and rips the dolls heads off.
Throughout the novel, Toni Morrison shows several messages that whiteness is superior. Besides the obsession with Shirley Temple and white baby dolls, light-skinned Maureen is more loved and accepted then the other little black girls. The idealization of white beauties in movies and Pauline Breedlove's preference for the little white girl she works for over her daughter are still more ways in which she shows America's obsession with white.
Even grown women depict the views towards white beauty. Pauline Breedlove, although saying she will love Pecola forever, views her as ugly and, as said before, learns to love the little white girl she cares for more than her own daughter. Geraldine, a woman who has grown up hating blacks and regards herself as a "clean black" as opposed to those "dirty niggers," despises Pecola and looks at other black children with disgust.
Above all, Pecola suffers the most from this hatred of blacks. She becomes confused with the way people treat her and begins to believe that beauty brings love. The one thing she wishes for, above all else, is blue eyes, with blue eyes, the bluest eyes in the world, she believes she will be beautiful, and in turn find love and happiness.
Toni Morrison does a terrific job showing how black women view themselves compared to those "white beauties," making her audience shudder from disgust, and weep from the terrible realization of what life once was like, and still is in some parts.
I loved the way Toni Morrison presented The Bluest Eye and will never forget how much her writing influenced me. She's done a great job affecting people with her writing in the past, and it is still affective today.