The Help

I know what you're thinking - "It's only the 8th, isn't that a little early for you to be posting the June book review?" Considering my history, where usually I'm just now getting around to posting the last month's book review, you're right.

But I've already finished The Help! I just started it yesterday afternoon and stayed up until 3 a.m. last night finishing it. I don't think I've read an entire book that quickly since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out twelve years ago and hid out in my junior-high bedroom and gobbled up the whole thing in one sitting.

I put off reading Kathryn Stockett's The Help for a long time. It was all over the media, and the bestseller bookshelves, and everyone and their brother was reading it, which made me a little skeptical. Lots of things make the bestseller list just for being popular, and I didn't want to end up reading another Nicholas Sparks novel but set in Mississippi in the 60s.

But after it was adapted into an Oscar-award-winning movie and was still on the charts long after it's debut, I figured it was time to give it a chance. Last June I decided to give Eat Pray Love a chance and ended up loving it - and the same thing happened with The Help. It's a great novel, full of poignant stories and characters that you grow to love/hate. A quote on the cover compared it to To Kill A Mockingbird, which was a little much for me - sure, it deals with the same issues of race relations in the south, but The Help just didn't have the timeless quality that TKAM does, at least in my opinion. It's a great summer beach or book club read that shows what it's like to be a black woman working as a domestic during the tumultuous 1960s. It reminded me a little of the musical Hairspray, a kind of light-hearted and easy-to-grasp story of racial tension. Not that it was completely sugar coated; there were plenty of sad and horrible things that happened to these women, but for me, it was predicable. Of course women were going to eventually open up, of course the book would get published, of course Stuart wouldn't be as perfect as she expected, of course the ladies would gain some ground.

I know the book has gotten some flak for being a feel-good version of the south, "written by a white woman to make other white women feel better about how blacks were treated," to paraphrase some reviews I've heard. But you know, it got people thinking about racism both then and now, and the movie earned Octavia Spencer an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress - making her one of only 6 black women to ever earn an Academy Award acting. And even if it wasn't on the same level as TKAM, I know I sure couldn't put it down. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a good novel to enjoy and think about over their summer vacation.