Published in 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is an enticing historical fiction that focuses on black life in the thirties.

The novel follows Janie, a young teenage girl unsure how to recognize love, but knowing that a fun passionate love is all that she wants. After sharing a brief kiss with a boy, her grandmother warns her that she needs a man who is going to have enough wealth to give her a comfortable life, even if it’s not what Janie wants. A wedding with a wealthy Logan Killings takes place and Janie tries to force herself to love him. After months she realizes that “marriage does not create love,” and she will forever be unhappy in this situation.

A while later she meets a man named Joe Starks, he speaks of far horizons and all that he will do for her. Intrigued, Janie leaves her old life behind and elopes with Joe before they arrive in Eatonville, one of the first all African-American towns in Florida.

Joe succeeds in fixing up the town but he never makes time for Janie and forces her to help him run the big store he set up in the town despite her complaints. He also makes Janie cover up her hair and doesn’t like her talking to the locals. After several miserable years, Joe passes away from kidney failure and for the first time Janie felt free, but she had lived so many years in captivity, she didn’t know what to do with her freedom.

Finally in her near forties, she stumbles upon a humble man, Tea Cake, who teaches her to play checkers; the first gesture that showed someone valued her mind over her body. Her whole life, people only seemed attracted to her physically, and they never knew who she was because she was silenced when she spoke.

As a mixed African American woman, Janie experiences several hardships in love, loss, friendship and injustice. This story is an accurate portrayal of life within the black community in the 1930s, illustrating the treatment of specifically black women and referencing colorism, while incorporating a coming-of-age story of finding yourself.