Book review: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
2026-06-16 BOOK-REVIEW“She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.”
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
I’m not sure exactly what put Their Eyes Were Watching God on my radar. It’s definitely outside of my usual fare, but I enjoy a dip into the classics now and then. While I initially struggled to get into it, it was ultimately a rewarding read.
Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford, an African-American woman living in early 20th-century Florida. The plot is framed by her recounting her life to her friend Pheoby, the one person in town who doesn’t self-righteously judge her morals and life choices from a distance.
Right from the off, we’re introduced to the two main styles of writing that the book is written in. When narrated, the prose is poetic. Janie’s return to her home town is vividly depicted, as are many other moments in the book, with turns of phrase that are evocative and memorable. In contrast to this, most of the dialogue, including the bulk of Janie’s narration of the book, is written in the southern-American patois of the time. I had a harder time with this, and had to make a constant effort to imagine the words being said out loud in order to understand them. This wasn’t helped at all by the typos in my Kindle edition, seemingly the result of bad OCR, as words like “himself” were changed to “btmself”, for example. All in all it wasn’t impossible to read, but just hard enough to make it quite frustrating. I’ve since seen other reviewers suggest the audio-book version as a better way to navigate the language, so I might give that a go for a future re-read.
And it is indeed worth a re-read; while not long, it is thematically rich and epic in scope. Janie’s life takes her through multiple relationships, in different towns across Florida. The people and places at each turn are well fleshed-out, convincingly making the reader feel present at each scene.
The book doesn’t dwell much on racial tension; most of the characters are African-American, and the tension is mostly centred around the dynamics of fledgling Black communities in post-slavery south. A recurring theme is how people in a miserable situation take their misery out on one another, in a way that feels painfully familiar even today. More than that, though, the book focuses on the relationships between Janie and the men in her life, as each one treats her differently, and provides her with different levels of support, love, and fulfillment. Throughout all of this, Janie’s own will and sense of self keeps her going through everything that transpires, and is ultimately the reason why she’s judged so harshly by some of her peers.
The story builds up to a climax that is dramatic and emotional. When we come full circle to the other side of our framing device, and are left back with Janie and Pheoby at the end of her story, we now feel the full weight of her experiences leading up to that point. In those final pages I struggled to put the book down, and was left shell-shocked afterwards, needing some time to digest it all.
I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Their Eyes Were Watching God, with the one caveat of the language presenting a bit of a hurdle. Make sure to get a copy that isn’t peppered with typos, or perhaps even the audio-book version.