In Morrisons acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlovean 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all othersprays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

Here, Morrisons writing is so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry (The New York Times).