The Bluest Eye

by Toni Morrison

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In a word: despair

In a Sentence: Pecola is the spirit of the beaten once those spirits have broken, embodied.

Synopsis: Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, follows little black girl Pecola from the distant eyes of a variety of characters in Lorain, Ohio. Everything in her life tells her that she is ugly, and so she yearns for blue eyes. Her family history is told in a series of flashbacks. Her life is told in a series of taunts and beatings, each of which chip away.

Reactions: This book absolutely defeated me. For at least a full day after finishing this book I walked around with my heart completely shattered. Morrison holds the power of expressing feeling in its most naked form at the tip of her pen. A rough, beautiful, tragedy.

Read if: you don't shy away from raw, unveiled human emotion.