Rating: 
Summary: It could have been good.
Review: Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel which, in terms of story line, is about a black woman who lives in the deep south during the early 1900's. No, this isn't a book about discrimination and Jim Crow laws. No, this isn't a book about hate or lynchings or some of the other topics that novels which similar characters in similar settings are about. This book touches on one womans search for love, and while things may have taken a change for the worse, she never lost herself. The story is laced with all sorts of metaphors and similies, which I do enjoy in a novel. I find that being spoon fed all the meanings and themes can create boredom, and seeing a creative style of writing can be refreshing. So why, do you ask, did I give this novel only one star? The answer is simple: it was the diction in the dialogue. As I explained before, the characters are african americans living in the deep south during the turn of the century. In order to reflect this, the author (Zora Neale Hurston) decided to write all of the dialogue with the accent. A character meaning to say "I don't care" came out as "Ah dun keer." A character meaning "Child, the Lord is watching over you" came out as "Child, da Lawd is watchin' ovah you!" While some may claim that this gives the novel a certain degree of authenticity, I find that it ruined an otherwise good novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely Beautiful
Review: This book was given to me by my husband when we were dating. It became one of my favorite books - it is beautifully written and one can hear the words coming off of the page. This is one of those books that should be required reading of every person and certainly should be taught in school. I wish Hurston had written more in her lifetime - I cannot get enough.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the most beautiful books about joy
Review: This is a truly beautiful book - not perfect, but full of enough glorious examples of prose that make it so wonderful to read. It is the story of Janie, a black woman raised by her grandmother, herself an ex-slave. Much of Janie's being is defined by her relationships with the three men in her life - Killicks, the older man her grandmother marries her off to before she is corrupted; Joe 'Jody' who convinces her to move away but is not all he promises to be; and Tea Cake, a younger man, the love of her life who takes her for herself as an individual, not the rich widow the other men see her as. Neale Hurston has the language and metaphor to describe many aspects most other writers fumble with - the longing for happiness and the future you believe you deserve; the happiness you can find when you find your soul mate; the inner depths of the soul. Deep, important issues, but dealt with a light and lyrical touch. Despite all that happens to Janie you can't pity her, because she doesn't pity herself after meeting Tea Cake, and has experienced a level of happiness most people never know. The one thing that can be a bit grating is the dialogue - it is all written as it is pronounced. This was probably the only way to do this authentically, and would have seemed odd if it wasn't, but it was still quite hard going.
Rating:
Summary: Gripping
Review: An intense, personal look at a woman's search for self that is not cliched, though it is familiar. Janie is so very real and her story demands attention. My only problem is the complete insularity of the characters and the non-dimensional portraits of some of the men. Still, you must read this. It is that good.
Rating:
Summary: What can I say about this book?
Review: It's almost silly to write a review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, because so many things have been said about it already. I liked the book tremendously. It is written in a powerful style, and you feel the pain and happiness that Janie goes through. It was a bit difficult for me at the beginning to follow the dialect, but after a while it was no longer so. This is a great novel, and I can see how Zora Neale Hurston's influence has touched a great deal of contemporary African American writers.
Rating:
Summary: My favorite book
Review: This is my favorite book of all time. As a black woman who played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance, and a pioneering anthropologist in the 1930's, Zora Neale Hurston was far ahead of her time. Her books are rich with the stories and language of the rural black south, and Their Eyes Were Watching God is the best one of them all.
Rating:
Summary: Even better the second time around
Review: Hurston spend much of her life collecting and transcribing the traditions and stories of African Americans and Caribbean cultures. In addition to her volumes on folklore and ethnology, she wrote four novels and several stories and coauthored a play with Langston Hughes, all of which drew heavily on the material she collected for her studies and on events from her own life. Of her works of fiction, "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is undoubtedly her best and, after reading it a second time, I have even more admiration for her accomplishment. One of the reasons the book resonates today with so many readers is the story's major theme: the difficulty of reconciling the struggle between social approval and well-being, on the one hand, and passion and self-respect, on the other. The heroine, Janie, must often do what is expected of her (by her grandmother, her husbands, or the community) at the expense of her own pleasure. Yet Hurston intends to do more than tell a simple story of a Southern black woman looking for Mr. Right. The author introduces characters and sketches that have less to do with the advancement of the plot and more to do with creating an environment: what life was like for black communities in Florida during the early twentieth century--the humor and the resentment, the misery and the fortitude, the camaraderie and the backstabbing. Characteristic of this leisurely documentary method is the manner in which the town's older inhabitants razz one another or the tale of Matt and his yellow mule, which manages to be at once funny, appalling, touching, and inspiring. All in all, the use of dialect and the meandering style make this novel not an "easy read" but a rewarding one. It saddens me that so many high school students are required to read this book. (I can relate: an exposure to "Julius Caesar" in the ninth grade instilled in me a loathing of Shakespeare that took me a decade to overcome.) This is a book to be savored like fine wine, not administered like cough syrup. An exceptional teacher with a classroom of widely-read students (as in AP English) might well succeed in stimulating enthusiasm for the story of Janie and Tea Cake, but it's certainly not a book meant to be crammed in a night's panic in order to answer a series of exam questions. For those readers young and old who do enjoy "Their Eyes Were Watching God," I also recommend Hurston's first novel, "Jonah's Gourd Vine," which portrays the same period and communities while recounting episodes based very closely on the author's own childhood.
Rating:
Summary: High quality novel
Review: This book is a great book, highly recommended for anyone interested in early days of America. While I don't want to give out so much information that it will spoil the book for you, I'll tell you that this book is situated around a woman named Janie. Janie is a young woman who had struggled all her teenage life to find a loving man. She soon marries a man who sets off to a new town in southern Florida and becomes a mayer of the town. The book, being set in an African American town, has context in an African American voice, so it may be hard for the younger ones to understand the context fully, but its not a killer to read. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in African American life in the era after the end of slavery. The book has some boring parts, but is ultimately a very touching novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Didn't live up to my expectations
Review: I think I got too much of a build-up on this novel. That's the trouble with reading reviews and criticism: sometimes the praise is just too effusive, sometimes the lambasting just too cruel. I like to stumble upon books like Nella Larsen's Passing with no prior knowledge of it or its reception, because then I am free to decide for myself its value to me. With a novel like this, that has been embraced by so many, to say that you did not care for it is almost like sacrilege. And yet, when it comes down to it, you have to speak your personal opinion. I found a lot of good things in here, but on the whole, I wasn't taken by it. The story itself is about Janie Crawford, a young black female in Florida who wants to marry for love, but whose mother forces her into a union with this old man simply because of his economic status. Janie listens to her mother, who tells her that love will come after awhile, but soon discovers that, instead, once the honeymoon is over, what comes is a different sort of treatment. She runs away with a smooth talking city fellow named Jody who has big dreams. His idea is to create a town of all black people. Janie runs off with him and helps him open a store then become mayor of Eatonville. At first, Janie thinks she has found the perfect life, but Jody refuses to acknowledge her, putting her conversely on a pedestal (the Mayor's wife) and runs her down (embarrassing her skills in the store). When Jody dies, Janie is courted by a young man named Tea Cake. With him, she discovers love. To end there, however, would be a fairy tale, and this is a story where not everyone lives happily ever after. The book contains a lot of dialect--almost all of the dialogue is in the language of the Florida black community--and after awhile, you get used to it. I mention it because it would likely put some readers off the book. Hurston also wrote an ethnography of African-American stories and myths called Mules and Men, and I'm much more interested in checking that out than more of her fiction, which, as accomplished as it is, just didn't appeal to me.
Rating:
Summary: One of my all-time favorite books
Review: I rarely re-read books - as there are so many books I haven't gotten to yet! - but my copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God is well-worn. When I feel stuck in a rut of disappointing books, Hurston's beautiful storytelling and rich characters remind me how pleasing a GOOD BOOK can be.
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