Hi friends, happy Wednesday and happy International Women’s Day! Today I’m posting my review of Zora Neale Hurston’s collection of short stories, Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick.

To celebrate International Women’s Day I wanted to post a review of, who I recently found out, was an author who’s work was so monumental to the literary world to women and women of colour.

Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick by: Zora Neale Hurston: For the first time, these short stories that author, Hurston wrote have come together in one volume where she captured African American life during the Harlem Renaissance. Touching on topics such as love, gender, class, sexism and racism, this collection of short stories gave such a precise representation of Black culture during that time and it was so fascinating to read about. As with every collection of short stories, some were better than others and some more memorable, but needless to say the writing throughout was strong and definitely gripped the reader from the start. The way some of them were written in a more verse-like way than prose was interesting because the reader didn’t feel like there was a coherent story in them; instead it felt more like a string of conscious thought written out. Despite a few of the stories feeling out of place in this collection, they were all fast-paced to read. This anthology opened on an introduction that gave a summary of what to expect from these stories and that felt beneficial to read beforehand. It could even be read again afterwards as a reflection, either way it felt valuable to read. In the end, this was something a little outside of this reader’s comfort zone, but was an engrossing and informative read.