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Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
219 pages (trade paperback)
Genre: Fiction/Historical/Literary
Like Into Thin Air, this was assigned reading. I had heard horror stories about the dialect, but I found the novel surprisingly readable and reasonably interesting. (By the way, the cover of my edition, with a foreword by Mary Helen Washington and an afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is just gorgeous.) This is a great book to analyze, perhaps not as great a book to read for pleasure, at least for this reader. There are definitely feminist undertones--Janie accepts and endures abuse by the men in her life, and even Tea Cake, who gives her the most self-agency, is controlling and jealous. Race, of course, also plays an important role.
I appreciate Hurston's work on a literary level, but I find the plot lacking--it serves only to drive the development of Janie as the all-important main character, which is a noble purpose and sufficient for mainstream fiction. I'm used to reading genre, I guess.
by Zora Neale Hurston
219 pages (trade paperback)
Genre: Fiction/Historical/Literary
Like Into Thin Air, this was assigned reading. I had heard horror stories about the dialect, but I found the novel surprisingly readable and reasonably interesting. (By the way, the cover of my edition, with a foreword by Mary Helen Washington and an afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is just gorgeous.) This is a great book to analyze, perhaps not as great a book to read for pleasure, at least for this reader. There are definitely feminist undertones--Janie accepts and endures abuse by the men in her life, and even Tea Cake, who gives her the most self-agency, is controlling and jealous. Race, of course, also plays an important role.
I appreciate Hurston's work on a literary level, but I find the plot lacking--it serves only to drive the development of Janie as the all-important main character, which is a noble purpose and sufficient for mainstream fiction. I'm used to reading genre, I guess.
