The Help by Kathryn Stockett

There has to be a name for this genre – beach book perhaps? It’s a page turner allright, the story of the lives of the ‘help’ (black maids) in the 1960s era in Mississippi. It’s told from the point of view of two black women and a white woman and I think there has been some discussion about how authentic their voices are. I wouldn’t know but I did find the characters all a little too good to be true. The white woman, Skeeter, really runs the story and I wonder whether Stockett isn’t perhaps just exploiting the history of the black underclass to frame up a nifty and politically titillating novel. Dunno.

Essentially, while it raises those black rights issues, it does so in an Anita Shreve, Anne Tyler, Bryce Courtney second tier verging-on-chick-lit type of way that includes all those relationship issues – the love interests, the miscarriages, the drinking problems, shocking injustices visited on the underclass – that so absorb writers like these. Books like this always leave me feeling like I just wasted a whole lot of hours on something that really ought to have been serialised in the Womens Weekly. Still, not-quite-chick-lit is like a bag of jelly snakes: I can’t stop until I’ve finished the whole lot and then I wonder why I stuffed myself with a bag of sugary sweet gummy stuff that does nothing to improve my health or state of mind! So read it because it’s compelling but beware. 2 ½ stars.