I'm almost finished listening to The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. Definitely well worth reading, and even more worth listening to.
The Help is set in the 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi. The book is narrated by two black maids and a young, white writer. Part of what makes it a great book to listen to is each narrator is read by a different person.
Stockett does a great job of building the characters, and I love her descriptions. The only reason I would recommend reading instead of listening would be so you could enjoy the descriptions at a more leisurely pace.
Skeeter, the white narrator, is fresh out of college and realizing that the way the black maids get treated doesn't sit well with her. She goes against her family and friends to secretly begin interviewing black maids in order to write a book. There is a lot of racial tension, but also wonderful insight into relationships.
3 comments:
good to hear this is worthwhile; i have this on request at the library. maybe i'll even get a chance to read it someday. grin.
Definitely worth reading. And worth waiting for too. I might wait awhile and read it in the paper form, too.
READ THIS BOOK! To anyone looking at the blog, I recommend reading this book. Well written, great character development, interesting plot, educational . . . all this with two strikes against being the "book within a book" idea that I think is a cheap trick and "made for book club" type book. I'd love to read more from this author. And I like how in the end she freely admits that as a white woman she really doesn't know what it is to be black in the south, and why she wrote this book.
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