In a 4-3 vote, the Wentzville School Board (Missouri) voted to ban the late Toni Morrison's first published book, "The Bluest Eye," which details the experiences of a young Black girl living in the wake of The Great Depression.

"By all means, go buy the book for your child," Wentzville school board member Sandy Garber said during the meeting, according to original reporting from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "I would not want this book in the school for anyone else to see." 

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner powerfully examines our obsession with beauty and conformity--and asks questions about race, class, and gender with her characteristic subtly and grace.

In Morrison's bestselling 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.

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