The Help by Kathryn Stockett

I have to confess: I didn't want to like this book. I read it for a book club, and it just felt too book clubby to me. Amazon has 2,726 reviews posted (and counting). If you carry the book around in public, you're guaranteed to be stopped by another woman who has recently read and loved the book, or who has heard from all her friends that she should read this book. Naturally, the contrarian in me wanted very much not to like it.

But I did. I found it really engaging, and very evocative of a time and place that is far removed from my own experience, and yet not so far removed from the culture and history that ground my experience. I would come home every evening and look at the book and want to pick it up and read it. I'd be willing to recommend the book to other people.

The Help is set in the 1960s and revolves around the project of a recent female college graduate, Skeeter (it's a nickname) to record and write the life stories of the Black maids who work for her own family and the families of her friends. The novel is told in three voices: Skeeter's, and the voices of two of the maids, Aibileen and Minny, and touches on themes ranging from personal relationships to racial tension. I kept waiting for it to turn heavy-handed or one-sided, but for the most part the characters and their relationships with each other remained complex and interesting, and I quite enjoyed the read.

That said, the contrarian in me still found things to take issue with. At least one of the important characters was, I though, too much of a caricature, and became more so instead of less as time went on. And I never completely got over the book-clubby feel of the book, although that's a little harder for me to define or explain. Still, no book is perfect, and none of that got in the way of what was just a really good read. Sometimes when everyone and their mother loves a book, it's because there really is something to like about it.