Book Club Friday

Happy Friday everyone! Today I'm introducing a semi-regular Friday feature (aka as frequently as I finish a book worth talking about) called Book Club Fridays! Grab a cup of tea or joe, get your reading glasses in place and get ready to talk books. We're leaving the woods behind and going all words today.

Today's selection? The Help, Kathryn Stockett's debut novel.

 

I tend to stray away from super popular books for two reasons. One, I'm afraid they won't live up to the hype. Two, there's nothing worse than being told "you have to read" something. I didn't get around to reading Harry Potter until Prisoner of Azkaban was released. Subsequently, it took the last person in my super informal real life book club finishing The Help and mentioning how much they enjoyed it for me to finally decide to borrow the oft-offered copy and give it a go.   

 

Set in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, The Help follows the lives of three women -- Aibileen, Minny, and Miss Skeeter -- through the Civil Rights era turmoil. Aibileen and Minny are both black maids who work, often for less than minimum wage in white households, cooking meals, tending children, and cleaning house. Meanwhile Miss Skeeter, a recent college graduate with few marriage prospect, begins to question her place in the circle of privileged white women who hire "the help." 

 

While initially turned off by the highly criticized use dialect for Aibileen's narrative, I forgot my "issues" with the dialect by about page 4.  By page 50 I was completely engrossed in the world of Jackson (and as result have had Johnny Cash stuck in my head ever since). The novel shifts between the viewpoint of the three main characters, not an easy feat to pull off, and the narratives mesh together beautifully. The story, intertwined with history, humor, love, and heartache, reads like a true labor of love.

I get where people are coming from with criticism for the book; perhaps the book is an overly rosy, simplified look at this historic time. However, calling Stockett out for taking licenses with time seems petty when Stockett fully acknowledges these discrepancies in her afterword. A misplaced reference to Shake N' Bake is hardly enough to undermine the entire integrity of the novel. Stockett does succeed in bringing the uncomfortable reality of Jackson, MS in the 1960s into the living room of many people who would, like that famous Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara, prefer to "think about that tomorrow." Overly rosy and simplified perhaps, but through her fiction, Stockett reaches out to a much larger audience then a stuffy book of sociology about these same facts ever would.

 

When I was 13, my family took a "Civil Rights" tour of the South, traveling through Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The Help reinforced much of what I learned on that trip as well as opened my eyes to different, less publicized elements of the Civil Rights movement. Not only does The Help contain an important U.S. history lesson, I found it whetted my appetite for some more Southern literature. Queue the Harper Lee and Carson McCullers!

 

Bottomline: The Help is a satisfying, thought-provoking read that keeps the pages turning and reader engaged and is a true testimony to the power of story.

What book are you reading these days?