Their Eyes Were Watching God

It's hard to rate this book. Hurston created great characters that we feel for and an engaging story. And most of the writing is beautiful. But the dialogue is difficult to read and pulls me out of the story.

Take the opening sentences:

“Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.”

The short novel is full of beautiful, poetic prose like that. But then the characters speak. At the time this was written, it was common for phonetic spelling to be used to show different accents. Hurston dials this up to eleven to the point that I often had to read the dialogue aloud to even know what it said. It's frustrating and breaks the spell of the story. Here's one example:

“It must be uh recess in heben if St. Peter is lettin' his angels out lak dis. You got three men already layin' at de point uh death ‘bout yuh, and heah's uhnother fool dat's willin' tuh make time on yo' gang.”

But overall, it's a powerful and well-written story about complicated love and perseverance of a marginalized black woman in my area of central Florida in the beginning of the 20th century.