Their Eyes were Watching God is a historical fiction novel about the life of women living during the 1900s. The novel was written by Zora neale hurston in 1973. There also is a recent movie adaption of this famous novel starring the one and only Halle Berry which was released in 2005.

The book starts of with young Janie Crawford living in a small little town where she was raised by her grandmother. As Janie becomes older her grandmother decides to get her married off to prevent her from doing wild things and running off like her mother. So she gets her married to a very old and disgusting , yet wealthy man named Logan Killicks. Janie, is no where near interested in Killicks and eventually runs away with a wealthy man named Joe starks. But after she marries  starks, things go downhill.

The plot of the story is pretty interesting.It shows what life was like as an African American women duringthis time period.Janie was a free spirited women, but still she had to act like a lady regardless. Hurston did a great job on portraying the historical accuracy as well. The events and timeline add up to actual history. Also, the way she described the setting and the people in the book is very detailed.

However, the book did have a few glitches. For one thing, the structure of this book is very confusing. The style that the author writes in is written in old southern english; Mainly because this book was written in almost 79 years old. It’s very hard to comprehend it and it takes a few tries when reading to fully understand. Also, the overall plot of this novel makes it a little bit more complicated. Since the book is very slow pace at first and then starts to speed up all of a sudden, it can make the reader a little intimidated and confused.

A movie adaptation of the novel was released in 2005, however, it didn’t live up to expectations. Halle Berry did an amazing job potraying the role of Janie Crawford but the movie itself wasn’t that great.. It left many viewers in the end asking questions and was missing some very key details about some other of the characters.

I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone under the age of 15 because of the complicated plot and unusual writing style. Overall, the book is bittersweet. After fully understanding it, it’s enjoyable however it’s a difficult read. But, it is one of Hurston’s best written novels.