Reviews

This was a hard read. The book itself was rather short but it still took me a while to get through. Morrisons prose is so rich and eloquent I could read a page and have it sit with me all day. The themes and topics are difficult ones but they only drive the themes home further. I made the mistake of reading of reading chollys pov on the train and I was not emotionally read to deal with what I was about to read, I was disgusted and wanted to cry all at one it I held it together and didn’t read any fir til I couldn’t properly sit down and give me full attention. To not feel the emotions that came up felt like the antithesis of what the book is preaching. I did end up crying at the end. I hate how every character is humanized as it makes it all the more painful to comprehend. Like the afterword says by Morrison herself this is an extreme case and not the norm but not miraculous enough to be disregarded. To see a person fall apart, it was a terrible beautiful experience.

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5.0

Brilliant and painful. This was my first read by Toni Morrison, though I'm kind of embarassed to admit that.

Toni Morrison is a master of prose. She paints a picture before your eyes of little Pecola, a girl described as ugly but also somehow tragically beautiful. It was so heartwrenching to watch Pecola suffer at no fault of her own and to see it all fall down at the end. I didn't find it "too graphic" as others did. It was just a sad story; A sad "reality".

At the end of this day, this read is an amazingly powerful commentary on the impact of racism on young black women. Pecola was made out to be ugly by everybody around her, the same messages that society imparts feverishly on black women today from every angle. And it was this that caused Pecola to break. The need she felt, though a construction in itself, to fit into racist constructions of beauty ended up costing a huge price.

Heartbreaking.