219 pages
English language
Published Nov. 8, 1998 by Perennial Classics.
Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person--no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.
Exquisite. I loved every page, even the ones I hated. What an ability to observe and depict human needs. What incredible beautiful puttogethering of words.
Powerful.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a quiet story of one Black woman's life two generations out from slavery, trying to be happy and find a life she'd like to live.
This book is the story of a life, the MC's life, and the relationships she has beginning as a young woman until she's in her forties or fifties. The narration is full of care, gently stepping in every once in a while when what the MC is thinking goes beyond what she feels safe to say (or even is ready to think).
I love how the MC is handled, especially the way the book covers a very long period of time by focusing in on the decision points, the times where the level of agency expressed by the MC is changing in some way. It keeps the focus on her and her choices rather that subjecting the reader to …
This is more a three and a half star review. The climax is incredibly done and the romance is memorable, but the pacing was a bit slow at times.
I get why it's a classic, I do. It's just that reading it right after The Bridge of Beyond made it pale in comparison. I'd probably have given it 4 stars if I'd read it amid a slew of old dead white men.
Oh well.
A Harlem Renaissance classic, it follows a black woman in early 20th-century Florida as she searches for independence outside of others’ expectations.
Well, its a classic, right, so you have to love it. Well, maybe. Was it a feminist novel, or a black one? Is it great literature? Did it have to have been written in dialect? (Bruce says that the speech and the characters were true to what he remembers of the south of his youth.) Why does it resonate so deeply with young materialistic women of the present day?
