Shabbat Reading: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

#whatireadovershabbat Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970; Vintage, 2007)

The Bluest Eye is a hard book. Hard because Morrison, as always, writes with a demanding verve and complexity. Hard also because the subject matter is brutal: the toll that racism and abuse takes on children. This was Morrison’s debut novel and, besides its difficulty, what you notice is that you can see the seams—how she constructed it, scene by scene. That quality is fascinating and instructive; it detracts nothing at all from the power of this book.