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Summary: Colloquialism in Their Eyes Were Watching God
Review: In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston utilizes colloquialism to accurately portray the lives of African Americans and the oppression they had to endure at the time. Through this and other aspects, Hurston provides an inspirational novel for all to enjoy.The way a group conveys their ideas affects how others listen and the validity of their comments. Perhaps Hurston's decision to express her characters in Southern black dialogue came from this notion. With the exception of Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, most blacks in books expressed themselves much like a white person, even though the way they talked clearly differentiated them from the whites. From the old gossips on the porch to Janie herself, emotion seeps from their words, as if the hardships they have endured have harbored their effects on their language. Although the dialect may make the characters sound uneducated at times, Hurston succeeds at allowing deep thoughts and universal truths to come out of Janie, Tea Cake, Logan, and Jody. For instance, Janie voices her opinion on love and age differences when she says, "Ah'm older than Tea Cake, yes. But he done showed me where it's de thought dat makes de difference in ages"(115). This is an idea that many people are for and against, and Hurston is ahead of her time by addressing it through Janie. Tea Cake's intelligence shines through his cumbersome words as well. Younger and not near as well off as Janie, he has had to learn life's lessons the hard way. When Janie questions whether he really wants her to go to the Sunday School Picnic with him, he replies in his joking but sincere way, "Me scramble 'round tuh git de money tuh take yuh--been workin' lak uh dawg for two whole weeks--and she come astin' me if Ah want her tuh go!"(109). His refutation in regional Floridian talk reflects how hard he has had to work his whole life and how much Janie means to him. If all the men in Janie's past had treated her as Tea Cake does, her happines would have been fulfilled many years before. Though character dialogue can be hard to comprehend in Their Eyes..., the final feeling one feels after reading it is one of pride for the black race, while at the same time getting a taste of what it would be like to be black. Hurston deals with the hardships of African Americans superbly through her acute ability to write the way blacks talk in this classic novel.
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Summary: Easy to read, but not easy to forget.
Review: By combining the elements of suppression and faith along with the endless search for self, Zora Neale Hurston created a most enjoyable novel: Their Eyes Were Watching God! The book covers the trials and tribulations of the main character, Janie, as she attempts to find personal happiness and her purpose in life through multiple marriages. Throughout the novel, Hurston uses the husband figures as building blocks, creating distinguishable similarities and dissimilarities between the characters in order to keep the flow of the book from episode to episode. Using the husbands as the backbone to the novel, Hurston progresses the book to a climax, making her developing character, Janie, complete. Not only is Hurston a wizard of literary structure, but she is also well-deserving for having produced a thought-provoking narrative with lasting effects.
Rating: 
Summary: Slightly Disappointed
Review: I found the book to be a pleasant read, however I felt it lacked in a few areas. For one, I felt it lacked a certain element of surprise. I thought it to be too similar to any other book written on the same subject. I also thought that Hurston could have done a better job connecting the readers to Janie. Naturally you wanted things to go well for her, but I simply felt as though I was being told her story. I never got the feeling that I was there, with Janie while everything was happening to her. The characters never came alive to me, they remained flat throughout the story. I wouldn't disagree with teaching this book in a high school english class. I think it has a good message, and I believe that there are people who could connect with Janie on a deeper level.
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Summary: Unbelievably good
Review: You read this book and wonder why it isn't taught in every highschool in America. You read this book and marvel at the sheer beauty of Hurston's writing. You read this book and question how one woman's insights in the 30's were so advanced for the time and are still true today. You read this book and your blood boils when you think of how Hurston was rejected as a credible author. You read this book and put it in a special place. You read this book years later and it's like visiting an old friend. You read this book and want to tell everyone you know about it and that it is unbelievably good.
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Summary: One of the best African American Classics out there.
Review: Initially, I was on of those who downgraded this book due to me having to work my way through the dialect. Then, I remembered that the author herself worked among these people to bring their story to the mainsteam, and after reading this again just recently, I found it to be one of the best, as well as one of the most empowering books way ahead of its time. If you read some of the books about and by African Americans women at that time, they usually ended up in bad circumstances. In this book, she shows how Janie, although she ended up being married three times, she really never gave up on what she really wanted, which was the love of a good man, and though things didn't work out like she wanted, she still was her own woman. To me, Ms. Hurston was way ahead of her time in that regard. I plan to introduce this book to my daughters when they get of age.
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Summary: A poor woman's lives a full life.
Review: After reading Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, I came to expect all African-American fiction to focus, at least partially, on exposing and protesting racism. This was and is a worthy cause, but, I must confess, it makes reading more laborious. Surely, I thought, there was more to the pre-civil rights black story than simply fighting against the injustices of whitey. This book is a celebration of southern black culture, not black oppression, or black resistance, though these are not completely absent. This is the story of a mildly privileged black woman in the south who must decide between the comforts of a stable but loveless marriage and the less certain prospects of true love with a drifter. If you find the paragons of the black canon a bit too preachy, this will be a breath of fresh air. This is my favorite book written by a female author.
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Summary: An easy, entertaining read.
Review: I wasn't very impressed with Their Eyes Were Watching God until I was nearly 3/4 of the way through it. It was then I realized Janie's evolving definition of love, based upon others and her own personal experience. It was pretty easy to read, and we didn't spend much time on it in my AP English class. It was enjoyable from beginning to end. If you like novels about people falling in true love and making it through tragedies, Their Eyes Were Watching God should satisfy you.
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Summary: Her best book. Probably one of the best books of all time
Review: This is one of the best books that I have read - and that encompasses a lot of books. I see it as a travel novel where someone (Janie) goes on a trip and along the way discovers something, in this case she discovers herself. It takes three husbands and lots of suffering, but Janie does discover herself and in discovering herself she also discovers love. It's not an easy life with Tea Cake. He's not perfect. His flaw, a fatal one it turns out, is that he gets jealous. But the relation Tea Cake-Janie is based on equality. Janie can and does grow there. Hurston speaks to us about these issues with multiple authorities: That of her personal experience as a black woman, that of an anthropologist and folklorist and that of an excellent modern and post modern novelist who grew up in Eatonville, the venue of her book. Yes, she got a degree from Barnard in anthropology studying under and with the famous Boas. Yes, she did original research, real research, and wrote papers on blacks from the point of view of a folklorist, and yes, she is a great novelist with remarkable range and control of language. What more do you want? Under attack from the black literary establishment because of her realistic and mostly unfavorable depictions of black men and the southern black community, she became obscure and died penniless and alone. Alice Walker, almost single handedly, rediscovered her and now she (Huston) is almost as well regarded in literary circles as she had been during the height of her career. Read this, her best book. Find out why.
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Summary: A Harlem Renaissance Classic!
Review: THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD is a haunting story told in the black vernacular about one woman's search for true love and independence. At age 16, Janie Crawford believes that she has every right to find true love on her terms. The day she lay beneath a pear tree in her grandmother's backyard and witnessed a bee pollinating there was the day she realized the sensual pleasures she wanted very much to experience in her life. But instead of her being able to explore these feelings and find her soul mate, she is confined to a couple of loveless marriages. The first was to a much older man, Logan Killicks, out of financial security and respectability (under the advisement of her randmother). The second marriage to Jody Starks was out of desperation to escape her first marriage and for security. But it will be Janie's third marriage to a much younger man, Tea Cake, which allows her to feel a sense of freedom in choosing someone to love openly for the very first time. Of course when the Eatonville community she lives in shows their displeasure over her relationship with Tea Cake, Janie throws caution to the wind by marrying and moving away with him to start a new life in the Everglades. Even though her third marriage ends tragically with her killing Tea Cake in self-defense, she doesn't seem to regret her experience. In fact, she makes peace with all that has happened in her life and returns to Eatonville in spite of the envious stares and gossip from the people speculating what happened between her and Tea Cake. She comes back no longer under the ownership of a man, but as a self-assured independent woman who owes no one any explanations. After reading this novel and discovering that Zora Neale Hurston was the recipient of 2 Guggenheims, the author of 4 novels, 12 short stories, 12 essays, 2 musicals, and 2 black mythologies, I could not help wondering how this literary giant disappeared from us for nearly 3 decades. To my disappointment I learned that her disappearance was due to her peers (mainly Richard Wright) criticizing her openly and publicly for not writing about the so-called "serious social trends" of the time. But what I cannot understand is how her peers could not think what happened to Janie Crawford (and women like her) by husbands and the community at large was not a serious social trend of the time. Just because Zora chose to write about the injustices done within the black community rather than the injustices done to the black community did not make her works any less poignant. The appeal and rediscovery of this novel by scholars, women writers, and the American public in general has definitely made THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD into a timeless classic of the Harlem Renaissance era.
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Summary: Not just because you have to!
Review: I know this book is often required by English teachers, but it can still be enjoyed. Hurston frames the story as a story-telling session by the main character, Janie, but the book will run away with you. I lost track of the narration and when it returned to Janie in the present at the closure of the novel I had forgotten that she was telling the story! The language is beautiful when Janie talks of love, trees, and pollen. The book and Janie's quest is a search for love, true love and an identity within that relationship. Janie is a child at the beginning, a wise older woman at the end. The relationships she has with men can relate to her development in age and as a person. It is a good read - it feels like someone is simply telling you a story. As a reader, you are caught in the momentum but you can also appreciate the inherent truths in the novel.
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