A review by jenniey3
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

5.0

Ostensibly, The Bluest Eye is about a young black girl who wishes for blue eyes, but it actually details a story of racism and socioeconomic disparities, while simultaneously acknowledging the humanity in both perpetrator and victim through meticulous examination of the multilayered intricacies that make up the human condition. The beauty of Toni Morrison’s writing lies in her ability to extract sound from color, color from smell, touch from taste, in such a visceral manner that one loses awareness of the five senses altogether; such is the sheer weight of her speech, impossibly fluid in the concoction of fantasy from thin air, that only she is allowed the power of constructing an endless river of lyricism, obstructing the flow of space and time, performing a feat so loud in its silence, so quietly intense that one could only refer to it as poetry. Foulness has never tasted so sickly sweet until Morrison sunk her pen into me, bleeding the bitter ink into my skin, coaxing the miserable story of Pecola Breedlove down my throat, wringing my neck with its vulgar truths, and forcibly prying the eyes of my self-effacing conscience open with a reflection from the mirror of privilege.