stapsreads: 'The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them' (Default)
stapsreads ([personal profile] stapsreads) wrote2011-01-01 06:51 pm

Kathryn Stockett, "The Help"

This was someone else's choice for the book club at work, and not something I'd have picked up out of my own choice. It's worth a read, though.

Book club will involve choosing one word to describe this, and explaining precisely why I chose it. My word will be 'evocative', and the reason is this: Kathryn Stockett has put an awful lot of effort into describing the Deep South of the 1960s, and (from my twenty-first century, British, perspective, at least) it works. Utterly convincing. She's good with dialect - uses enough of it to set the scene, but uses it well enough that it becomes part of the background, and doesn't get between the reader and the story.

I did feel uncomfortable about the fact that this is a white woman telling the story of a white woman telling the stories of black women. Happily, Stockett does question this explicitly both in the text itself and in her author's notes.