The Help, 1.19.10

This year, I am going to merge my love for reading with blogging by posting a BRIEF report on each book I finish throughout the year. Not meant to be material suitable for the New York Times book review, but hopefully something above a mere reading log entry. Also, this might serve as a bit of a decoy to the fact I joined the little club where they send you free books so long as you post reviews of them in your blog. This is not one of those entries, but believe me friends it is coming and I am quite sure you will know the books I was given as they are far from my normal preferred genre of fiction.

Okay, enough of an intro, on to The Help. I loved The Help – partly because I was able to imagine the thick southern dialect dripping off the characters mouths throughout the whole story and also the history major in me was enthralled with a different understanding of the Civil Rights Era. To backtrack, The Help is set in Mississippi in the sixties bouncing between two African-American maids and one recently graduated from college, white, rich, unmarried aspiring writer. As an aside, isn’t it funny how many main characters are aspiring writers? I suppose we do indeed write what we know.

The Help isn’t classic literature but the story is quite engaging and enjoyable. I found an honesty as all of the characters wrestled with class, race and the changing times (there is even anachronistic quote of Bob Dylan). Throughout the story, the love between African-American domestic and white young child resonated so deeply it made me (almost) wish I had been raised by doting, no-nonsense black nanny instead of my biological mother. Okay, not really, but just for a second I wondered what that would be like and for those of you who know my mother, please don’t tell her I said that. I think The Help would make an outstanding movie which is admittedly a terrible barometer of a book’s quality, but true nonetheless.