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Kathryn Stockett, "The Help"
Jan. 1st, 2011 06:51 pmThis 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.
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.
