Their Eyes Were Watching God

Hello Pear Blossoms,

So, I finished a book for school and felt obligated to tell you about it as I'm not done with my current book yet. I mean, it hasn't been that long, but you know. It's a book. This is a book blog. Gotta do the thing.

Alright, so for school they had us read Their Eyes Were Watching God. Why? Who knows. What educational value does this give us besides actually reading something written by a black person for once? Not much. But whatever, I do what I'm supposed to. So this book follows the story of Janie Crawford. She lives in like the 1930s I believe and is swiftly married off after just a kiss with a boy named Johnny Taylor at the age of sixteen. It was her first kiss. The novel goes through an account of her life with three husbands, two who tried to hold her back and one who just wanted to love her but was super shady. It wasn't a romance novel so much as a feminist novel. It wasn't a book so much about racial oppression as much as gender oppression.

Many people in my class didn't like the book as they found it hard to read and thought it had a bunch of miscellaneous stuff in it. I didn't find it that hard to be honest. It shifts from eloquent writing to black southern dialect in the dialogue. I transitioned between the two pretty well so I didn't find it very difficult. And I thought that the miscellaneous stuff was mostly to show an example what everyday life was like in that setting. What's this mean for me? Probably that I read too much and that my ability to translate and make assumptions about books is too advanced for my peers. Do I care? Not really.

I didn't hate the book. For a school book, I thought it was alright. Would I ever pick it up voluntarily? No. But of all the books I was forced to read against my will, this was the best one.

6/10
~Book Panda