Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is one of the most provocative works of fiction I’ve ever encountered. On the surface, that’s not surprising. It’s a novel about a young girl, Pecola, who is abused at home and becomes pregnant as a byproduct of incest. Racism, molestation, beauty standards, and plenty of other issues are also major themes in the book, making it a hit with the library and school book banning police.

That said, the work is stirring even further by how it depicts these things. Any writer can tell us about the rape, incest, physical abuse, family screaming, local loony and lodger with the roaming fingers; these are all unfortunate grotesque elements of everyday life on this planet. What Morrison does instead is make us feel compassion for both the abused and the abuser, to get a glimpse into the reasons behind these characters’ actions through their various dark histories.

And it isn’t like being told “Mr. Smith had a rough childhood” while he’s on the witness stand for murder; it’s much more complicated, and as the critically acclaimed Nobel Prize recipient’s first novel, it’s also quite impressive. Yes, Cholly Breedlove rapes his little girl and gets her pregnant in the process. We obviously condemn him for such an evil act. Yet we also feel sorry for him, in a way, after we witness the racism of his past, his childhood abandonment, his lack of love throughout the majority of his life. We see Cholly raping his daughter as his own twisted declaration of love, as well as hate; and though we cringe, not wanting to watch, not wanting this poor girl to have to endure even more, we also realize that Cholly himself has problems that have led up to this moment, and that he needs help, too.

Having seen the film first, I thought back to Little Children when I read The Bluest Eye; I never thought that I’d experience any degree of compassion for a child molester. Cholly certainly deserved a punishment for his monstrous acts against his poor daughter—as Ronnie did in Little Children—but so did Pecola’s mother, another product of a poor background who failed to give her daughter the love and attention she needed, and who, instead of believing her daughter, slapped her after she was raped by her own husband.

A powerful book about the entrapments of poverty and violence, the early loss of innocence, and the destruction of a little girl—physically through her own environment and caregivers, mentally and emotionally through the stereotypes forced upon her through the color of her own skin and the perceptions of her town—The Bluest Eye certainly isn’t one of the most uplifting books you’ll ever read, but it’s definitely one of the most powerful and thought-provoking works you’ll ever experience.