Hurston, throughout the whole book, amazed me with her ability to make you feel like you were there with Janie through every area of her life. Hurston uses a lot of dialogue to tell the story. But what makes her writing style so great is she writes these dialogues exactly how the people of that time would talk. She also does an amazing job at putting the perfect feelings of each person through what they say to help you better understand each character more clearly.
In some books, authors make the mistake of making characters too perfect, like they could never possibly exhist.. In this book though, Janie is seen as a strong willed, young, and beautiful woman who can't ever seem to be able to make up her mind.. Along her journey she meets three men who alter her life forever. Logan Killick, her first husband, treated her with no respect as woman. She soon ran into Jody who seemed perfect and ran away with him to get married and moved to one of the first black communities. After a while, he started abusing her mentally by the way he talked to her. Then Tea Cake came along and once again seemed perfect. That is until he went crazy after being bitten by a mad dog. In the end, she goes home in rememberance of her past endeavors, ready to move forward in her life.
The book was set in Southern Florida after slavery had been outlawed. African Americans are just starting to make their mark on history by building their own communities and becoming their own people. Hurston does an amazing job of showing this setting through the places Janie goes and the way the people talk to each other. Through the whole story, Hurston portrayed this time period very well.
There are many other reasons why this book was so brilliantly put together, but these are the main reasons. From the author's brilliant style, to the characters in the book, to finally the setting of the book, this book is extremely jam packed with an interesting tale if you're in the mood for something kind of tragic, yet inspiring!
