A review by willowbiblio
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

dark emotional sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

 "It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds- cooled- and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in it's path."
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Normally I'm an easy 5-star for Morrison's books. This one really missed for me. I can see flashes of her later excellence, and there are passages that are absolutely stunning. I suppose I found the highly descriptive eroticism of the several pedophiles here to be so off-putting that I nearly started skimming. I didn't see the point of giving that POV so much page time- it felt too overdone and didn't add to the narrative for me. Maybe this is due to my own personal history as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, but it made me extremely uncomfortable and significantly reduced my positive experience of the novel. I also felt like the narrator switches were a bit more disjointed than I'm used to seeing from Morrison.

I thought it was an inspired move to not have Pecola tell her own story until the end when it was too late. She was silenced both as a narrator and a participant in her own life until it was too late to help her.
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