Just Finished Reading...

The Help by Kathryn Stockett
*read by Jenna Lamia, Bahni Turpin, Octavia Spencer, and Cassandra Campbell on audiobook

“Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.” ― Kathryn Stockett, The Help 

Well, Mammy's still waiting for someone to ask her...

      
          I started out listening to the audiobook of The Help on a six hour trip back from Pensacola Beach.  I was never really excited to read it, because I usually don't find myself enjoying many of the mainstream best-sellers in women's fiction - or "chick lit" I like to call it.  It happened to be the only book available to check out on my online library account at the time, so when my companion and I were finally bored enough on our drive home, we turned it on.  Right away, we were both entertained.  The narrators all did an exceptional job, and the narrator for Minny even went on to play her in the movie. 

          We continued listening to it on a two hour drive to Orlando and back over the weekend, and when I got home, I decided I didn't want to have to wait to finish reading it; so I ran out to Barnes and Noble and bought the paperback.
          I'm not going to waste time summarizing the story, because just about everyone's read it or seen the movie, or at least know the premise.**   I'm just going to jump in with my reaction, so I apologize for any spoilers I may reveal.  The Help is definitely an entertaining read.  The characters are well-developed, and I felt invested in their stories.  Should this book be considered a champion of the civil rights movement and the victorious black women of the South?  Heavens, no.  It was, after all, written by a white woman, Kathryn Stockett, who, like Skeeter, grew up in Mississippi.  Stockett was also sued by her own brother's housekeeper for using her likeness to create the character Aibileen. The suit was only thrown out due to a statute of limitations.  The character of Skeeter is not interested, nor does she know much about, the black woman's struggle under the Jim Crow era, and only initially decides to create a book about black housekeepers in Jackson because she has a dream to be published.  The character Aibileen in the story is even responsible for giving Skeeter the idea to write the book.  So why anyone would mistake Skeeter as the heroine of the story is beyond me.  Aibileen and Minny risk their jobs and safety to write this book.  Skeeter risks being ostracized from Hilly's League.  Her biggest worries are getting her hair to straighten and to find a man to marry so that her mother will stop pestering her. Skeeter is merely the editor of the book, so it bugs me that she takes so much credit for it. 

 Things That Also Bothered Me

          Aibileen - I can't believe Aibileen would be truly sorry to leave her job working for Elizabeth.  She's sad to leave Mae Mobley and perhaps the steady income, but I would think she'd be jumping for joy to be rid of those women and their bridge club lunches.  Plus, she gets a job writing for the paper, and there's potential their book will bring in more money as time goes on.
          Minny - Minny's story was my favorite to read.  She's a strong, outspoken woman full of sass, so I was surprised that she suffered from spousal abuse.  She addresses it in the end of why she doesn't fight back, and eventually leaves Leroy, but I have to wonder why the author thought it was necessary to put this in.  It seems that it's only the black men who are seen doing the abusing and leaving and not the white men.  I'm not sure what the author's message is here.
          Skeeter - Beyond what issues I already have with this character, I can't understand her friendship with Hilly.  Skeeter speaks in a disparaging manner about her closest friend, and can't trust her to not snoop in her satchel, and yet because they've been friends since childhood, she reasons that's justification enough to have stayed  her friend so long.  Also, the storyline with Stuart seemed nothing more than a way to show the "sacrifices" Skeeter makes for her dear new friends publishing deal.  I think the story would have been much better if Skeeter wasn't in it in the first place.  This wasn't her story to tell.  I'll be interested to see how the movie portrays her, but I'm sure it will be much the same since Stockett and her close friend were the screenwriters/director for the film.  I hope that the readers and audience of this story realize the irony/hypocrisy of it all.  It is still a white woman telling her version of the black woman's story.  The cheesy declaration at the end that the point of the book is to show that there's really not much different about us women is the most ridiculous revelation Skeeter could make.  I didn't see a whole lot of similarities between Minny and Hilly, Minny and Celia, or Aibileen and Elizabeth.
          Plot plunks - There were a lot of plot secrets Stockett used to keep the story intriguing:  What is wrong with Celia?  What happened to Constantine?  What was the "horrible thing" that Stuart's ex-fiance did? And all of them were either predictable, overly-dramatized, or both.

          Overall, I don't discourage anyone from reading this book.  It is an entertaining read, probably more so as audiobook, but please take it as the work of fiction that it is and not a revolutionary memoir of the Jim Crow south.

**After spending the holiday at my grandmother's house, I feel obliged to mention the premise, as she had heard about the book from her friends and tried to download it on her Nook, only to have accidentally downloaded The Help, A Novel, or The Secret Confessions of a Traditional Housekeeper by Shay Arthur.  She complained, "I don't know why everyone says that book is good.  I thought it was so boring."  She started to tell us about the plot, and that's when we realized she had purchased the wrong book. 
          The Help is told from the point of view of three women: Aibileen, a housekeeper in Jackson, MS who has worked her whole life working in white people's homes and raising their babies; Minny, Aibileen's friend and fellow housekeeper who gets in trouble for her sass-talking, and Skeeter, a recent college graduate who is a socialite and friend of the women Minny and Aibileen work for. Skeeter's dream is to become either a writer or journalist, and by way of talking with Aibileen, decides she wants to write about housekeepers' experiences working in the south.

I apologize if this review is not the most cohesive. I wrote it over the span of my week on Thanksgiving holiday - ten minutes here and there.

Just Finished Reading...

The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan

While I enjoyed last year's The Lost Hero starring Jason Grace as the Roman demigod and amnesiac, I felt there was something missing.  Leo is the only character who sticks out in my memory from my reading of the first installation of the new Heroes of Olympus series.  Maybe because he *SPOILER* appears in book two.  I didn't feel as invested with the characters as I had with Percy, Annabeth, and Grover from the first Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. 

The first two books are a set up for the new fight.  In PJatO, the fight was with Kronos, in HoO, the fight is with big, bad mamma Gaea.  The Greek and Roman camps are unaware of each other, but will now be forced to work with one another in order to fight the mother of creation. 

In Son of Neptune we find out where Percy's been the whole time Jason and his new gang were fighting wind gods and flying around on mechanical dragons on a quest to free Hera/Juno.  Percy wakes up from a long nap and finds himself at a camp for Roman demigods, Camp Jupiter.  He meets two campers, Hazel and Frank, who helped save his life but are of course not highly respected by the other campers.  I thought these characters were more richly drawn than the characters in the previous book, and so I cared more about their stories.  Hazel gets flashbacks that render her unconscious, and Frank, though big and beefy, doesn't think much of himself.  Percy is his usual self, even with losing his memory, full of wit, humor, and courage only a true hero possesses.  Their quest is to free the god of death, Thanatos (imprisoned somewhere in Alaska), defeat the king of giants, Alcyoneus and rush back to help defend Camp Jupiter from attack by the Feast of Fortuna.  No problem, right?  Actually, that's my only quip with these stories.  It seems too easy for these half-bloods to defeat these ancient (and usually stupid) monsters.  I would think the gods have to be on their sides for them to always be so victorious.

What I love about this new series is that (and I said this with the first book) it introduces the reader to Roman mythology.  The reader sees that not only do the names change of the gods, but that their personalities are altered as well.  We see this mainly with the character of Ares/Mars in book two. 

Riordan gives us more of what we love:  good battles, a tiny sliver of puppy love, lots of humor, and a world where fantasy and reality collide.  If you haven't read The Lost Hero, you could probably skip it and read The Son of Neptune without missing a beat. 

Oh, yes.  My only other problem with the book was that I bought it as a Nook book, and the spacing was jacked up throughout.  Slightly annoying.