The links on this blog are paid advertisements. Learn more here.

Monday, May 21, 2018

Their Eyes Were Watching God

I tend to have difficulty appreciating books that are filled with accents that are portrayed phonetically.  For me, the story often gets buried under the effort to decipher what's being said.  But in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston's beautiful prose makes the story shine through.  Hurston tells a story about Janie Crawford, a woman who was biracial in the 1900s, which, of course,65 wasn't a great time to be the product of an interracial marriage.  Janie spends the book searching for love, but for her this turns out about as well as it did for Romeo and Juliet. More than that, the story is a compassionate, but ultimately fairly bleak, look into the immense difficulties facing both women and minorities at the time, which were compounded for the protagonist.  I can't think of much else to say about this book without spoiling it except to say that I did not see the ending coming.

Image result for Their Eyes Were Watching God


No comments: