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A review by odin45mp
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
3.0
Read as part of my library's Libraryopoly challenge, I pulled this from the Chance box.
This is definitely outside my normal reading tastes. It is well written and fairly respectful to its subject matter, but I feel that it shied away from some of the more brutal excesses of life in the South in the early days of the civil rights movement - some brutality is mentioned off camera, but aside from one character doesn't seem to really touch the characters, and thus this reader. I struggled more than once with the African American dialect having been written by a white woman, that is a personal stumbling block and not an indictment of Stockett's prose.
The story itself feels small "i" impactful in what it is setting out to do, and it does it well. We follow the lives of women in Jackson, MI, 2 black, 1 white, and how they together end up telling the stories of "The Help", the black women who work as maids for the wealthy white women in town. Small town politics, small town gossip, small town sticking-noses-in-other-peoples'-business made me want to give up reading it more than once because I. Don't. Care. And frankly they shouldn't either, it isn't the end of the world like they think it is. But I stuck with it and the story and characters were entertaining and sometimes touching, but this is not something I would normally read and doubt I will ever read again.
This is definitely outside my normal reading tastes. It is well written and fairly respectful to its subject matter, but I feel that it shied away from some of the more brutal excesses of life in the South in the early days of the civil rights movement - some brutality is mentioned off camera, but aside from one character doesn't seem to really touch the characters, and thus this reader. I struggled more than once with the African American dialect having been written by a white woman, that is a personal stumbling block and not an indictment of Stockett's prose.
The story itself feels small "i" impactful in what it is setting out to do, and it does it well. We follow the lives of women in Jackson, MI, 2 black, 1 white, and how they together end up telling the stories of "The Help", the black women who work as maids for the wealthy white women in town. Small town politics, small town gossip, small town sticking-noses-in-other-peoples'-business made me want to give up reading it more than once because I. Don't. Care. And frankly they shouldn't either, it isn't the end of the world like they think it is. But I stuck with it and the story and characters were entertaining and sometimes touching, but this is not something I would normally read and doubt I will ever read again.