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BOOKS I READ: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970). Based in Morrison’s hometown, Lorain, Ohio, this novel is the story of Pecola Breedlove, a Black girl who is a lightning rod for scorn from everyone around her. A desperate Pecola visits the preacher, Soaphead Church, a charlatan who boasts of many miraculous deeds, to ask him to give her the bluest eyes. Frieda and Claudia, the McTeer sisters, are sympathetic to Pecola’s plight, unlike the adults who admonish Pecola for her ugliness, and then for her role in her brutal rape.
Toni Morrison’s first novel is a story of racism, self-loathing, poverty, and violence. Much of what we learn is through Claudia’s eyes, but she switches point of view so we can learn the backstories of some of the main characters, specifically Pecola’s father, Cholly Breedlove’s. His broken childhood, one of rejection, fosters the broken man he becomes.
See my Bookshop.org stand, supporting local bookstores.
See also, my reading log; or the previous reading-log entry, which led me to The Bluest Eye.
