The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye / Toni Morrison, 211 pgs.

Toni Morrison's classic is beautiful and horrifying. Pecola Breedlove is the central character yet we see her only through others.  She is ugly, she knows she is ugly, she just wants to be pretty.  She wants blue eyes because all of the examples in her life are of pretty blue-eyed girls.  Pecola's life is not great.  Her family is poor and on the bottom end in every way.  She seems to be the thing people look at to think, "At least my life isn't as bad as Pecola's."  This isn't really an enviable position but then things just get worse for her.  Not easy to read but not easy to put down. Hard to believe this was Morrison's first book.  She is a national treasure.

Rules

Rules by Cynthia Lord  200 pp.

This was a re-read in preparation for the March Treehouse Book Club. Twelve year old Catherine keeps a list of rules of behavior she tries to teach her autistic brother, David. She is frequently embarrassed by his failure to understand how social interaction "should" be handled. When she befriends a wheelchair bound boy who speaks by pointing at pictures in a book, Catherine begins to understand that "normal" isn't a fixed standard and that different is not necessarily wrong.