The Bluest Eye

A Novel

By: Toni Morrison, Jacqueline Woodson - introduction

Narrated by: Toni Morrison, Karen Murray

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtlety and grace. • With a new introduction by Jacqueline Woodson.

“So precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry”—The New York Times

In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

Critic reviews

A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME

A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK!

“So precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.” —The New York Times

“A profoundly successful work of fiction. . . . Taut and understated, harsh in its detachment, sympathetic in its truth . . . it is an experience.” —The Detroit Free Press

“This story commands attention, for it contains one black girl’s universe.” —Newsweek

fantastic reading of an excellent book

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes-- it was excellent. One of the best audiobooks I've ever heard. The book was great and the author's peerless reading of it only serves to make it all the more of a gripping experience.

What did you like best about this story?

Morrison's prose is so excellent. She perfectly writes with the voice of a child narrator-- indifferent, pragmatic, but never simplistic. I've never read/heard anything like it.

Have you listened to any of Toni Morrison’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

This one is my absolute favorite. The delivery is riveting-- so patient and emotive-- downright chilling at times.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes

One of my all-time favorite books.

Loved reading it, adored listening to it. Great narrating, Ms. Morrison really brought the book alive. You might want to keep a box of tissues handy, there are parts that will break your heart . However, I still feel uplifted by this book. I highly recommend it.

50 Years On -

Pecola, it’s given away from the get go in the novel is not going to be a happy girl. What I wasn’t ready for was the slow winding noose encircling her, drawing ever so tighter into a place where resist as she might she can not deliver herself from. I felt a certain impotence witnessing this immolation of a girl. I knew a few Pecola’s, particularly in grade school. They really do fade, or better put we dim them. This book raises the question of how self hatred is learned and in some cases inherited. To read it now 50 years after it’s publication is to engage in an archeological exercise, but not to dust off some notion of how far we have come. No quite the opposite - how little we have progressed.

Gutted

I'm embarassed to say that at thirty-seven years old, this is my first Toni Morrison book. Twenty to thirty minutes into this book, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably. For the first time in my life, I heard a beautiful voice articulate all the hurt, self-loathing, and self-destruction that us Black people all carry deep inside our pysche. Using beautiful and elegant prose, Ms. Morrison captured a generations-old wound I have always felt, but could never locate and identify. I have no idea how this book will touch or affect a white reader, but I can only hope it create an awareness (and disgust) of the psychological and cultural slaughter that was slavery in America and the intense feelings of superiority with once being and believing themselves to be the "master race", which continue play themselves out today. Every person should read this book. The collective horror it captures should haunt and educate us all. I can't wait to consume more of her books. The flood gates are now open for me.

audible and literal

I read along as I listened. I become mesmerized listening to her narrative. The printed word is grounding. But the text as filtered through my mind is enhanced by listening to the intonation and phrasing as read by the author