This was only my second Toni Morrison but I’ve already quickly learned that picking up one of her books will 1000% end in pure, unadulterated heartbreak... and I am a-okay with that.
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I actually preferred this one over Beloved, which I still loved, because I think the brevity of the book increased its impact. Morrison proved that she doesn’t need a lot of words or pages to make a powerful point, something I’m sure a lot of authors strive to achieve but never quite do.
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The Bluest Eye tells, through a myriad of perspectives (one of my favourite literary techniques), the gut-wrenching story of Pecola Breedlove, a young girl suffering under the harmful racial beauty standards she’s subject to. I don’t usually read introductions before I start a book (they’re usually full of spoilers), but I read Morrison’s foreword and it was illuminating, and also made it all the more heartbreaking as she revealed it was based on something she actually witnessed - a young black girl she knew as a child who wished for blue eyes because she thought they were the most beautiful.
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She writes so eloquently about the ingrained prejudices and the awful power imbalances at play, especially in working relationships between black people and white people. It broke my heart reading about Mrs Breedlove basically having to deny her own child to keep the child of her white employer happy. Morrison questions and challenges how and why such racial self-loathing is learned by innocent children by telling it through the story of one of the most vulnerable, and truly Pecola’s story will stick with me for a long time.