Their Eyes Were Watching God

Just finished this by Nora Zeale Hurston. Really nice book. Mildly boring through the first half, and beautiful & sad through the second half, which actaully mirrors the main character's life. Hurston wrote in the thirties and was considered the best "negro writer of the day". Then her work sort of fell off the radar for a few decades and was revived again in the seventies when Alice Walker named her as one of her great influences and argued that Their Eyes was a great work of feminist literature, and later as she came to be more studied in academia and read by masses, the world changed Hurston's descriptor to one of "the best American writers of her time".

The story is told using dialect from the time and place (in Georgia and Florida, a generation after slavery was abolished) - about a woman's life, search for love and personal fulfillment I guess... Janey is married off at 16 by her grandmother who was determined to see her secure and protected before she died. The grandmother was born into slavery and was freed just after her daughter was born. Grandmother spent the rest of her life trying to keep herself and then her children and grandchildren safe and secure in a world that was very dangerous for black people. Janey grew up a generation after slavery, and so her dreams go beyond her grandmother's ideal of safety toward something like true love, fulfillment, and happiness.

Hurston is an amazingly poetic writer, and often the first line of a chapter would make my heart skip a beat and my eyebrows raise for a second. The first line of the book stopped me cold, and I don't normally take notice of language.

Blah blah blah.