Morrison's first novel is set in Lorain, Ohio, in the years after the Great Depression. It follows Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl who believes her life would improve if she had blue eyes like the white children celebrated around her. Told partly through the eyes of her schoolmate Claudia, the book looks at family hardship, cruelty and the damage done by narrow ideas of beauty. It is a painful, compassionate novel about how a community and a society can fail a child.