From the back cover: 
 "There is no book more important to me than this one." -- Alice Walker 
 "Their Eyes belongs in the same category -- with that of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway -- of enduring American literature." --Saturday Review 
 "The prototypical Black novel of affirmation; it is the most successful, convincing, and exemplary novel of Blacklove that we have. Period." --June Jordon,Black World 
 My review: 
 This book has a foreword by Mary Helen Washington and an afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., both of whom put Zora Neale Hurston's work and life in context. This was a great help and added to my enjoyment of the book. Most of the story is told in the vernacular and is sometimes tough going, but worth the effort. The language is rich and the story observant of human behavior. One of the best descriptions of sexual awakening I've ever read: 
 "She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid." 
 The story is Janie's - how she seeks and finds that pear tree feeling in her life and marriages.