THE BLUEST EYE - by Toni Morrison
New Birth's February 2026 Book of the Month

The very first novel by the indelible Toni Morrison explores America's unflinching obsession with beauty through the eyes of 11-year-old Pecola, who prays for blue eyes. Sharp and insightful, Morrison's narratives always retain an almost prophetic cultural relevance, and Bluest Eye is no different.
%u200B%u200B%u200B%u200B%u200B%u200B%u200B
In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays 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.