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jwageman 's review for:
The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
I think I'd read anything by Toni Morrison for her sentences alone. The story--about the origins of self-loathing, centered around Pecola Breedlove's desire to turn her eyes blue--is brutal, but told in such captivating prose that it's hard to look away. The novel wraps itself around several characters, shifting from Claudia's first-person narrative of herself, her sister, and her classmate Pecola, to broader social portraits of their neighborhood and the country, to third-person histories of adult characters. Morrison reads the audiobook.
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"Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father'sbaby that the marigolds did not grow. A little examination and much less melancholy would have proved to us that our seeds were not the only ones that did not sprout; nobody's did. Not even the gardens fronting the lake showed marigolds that year. But so deeply concerned were we with the health and safe delivery of Pecola's pbaby we could think of nothing but our own magic: if we planted the seeds, and said the right words over them,t hey would blossom,and everything would be all right" (6)
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"Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father'sbaby that the marigolds did not grow. A little examination and much less melancholy would have proved to us that our seeds were not the only ones that did not sprout; nobody's did. Not even the gardens fronting the lake showed marigolds that year. But so deeply concerned were we with the health and safe delivery of Pecola's pbaby we could think of nothing but our own magic: if we planted the seeds, and said the right words over them,t hey would blossom,and everything would be all right" (6)