Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.
Pecola Breedlove thinks she's had such an unfortunate life because she's a dark skinned girl. The book is powerful. It had a profound effect on me. It made me love Morrison in all of her hard-to-read glory, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby. For a very long time her words gave me life. (S/N Where are all the writers of this caliber. I mean soul-changing writers.) I am a dark skinned girl who was teased mercilessly growing up. Now, I love my skin, back then, not so much. So at the height of young adulthood, seeing self-hate through someone else's eyes, changed my life. And I don't mean that in the overly dramatic way of internet expression, I mean it seriously and whole heartedly.
It changed my life.
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