(Penguin, $30)
I am a major sucker for books set in the American South. I think it’s because – like the Irish – the folk from the South have a certain unusual way of putting things that adds an extra layer, usually of humour.
There’s certainly plenty of that, despite the underlying grimness of the topic in The Help.
Skeeter is a gangly white 22-year-old who hardly fits the Southern belle mould, much to her mother’s chagrin. Aibileen is a wise, regal, black maid who is trying to save her toddler charge from growing up a racist like her momma.
Minny is Aibileen’s smart-mouthed best friend – she’s just lost another job and is hoping no-one else finds out why.
Together these three women are about to do something that will change the way whites think about the help, and in some ways vice versa, forever.
Set against the background of the burgeoning civil rights movement of the 1960s, it’s far more intimate than political. Martin Luther King might be making speeches across the country, but a black maid in Mississippi still has to use a different toilet from the white folk.
Kathryn Stockett fought off plenty of criticism when this book hit the bestseller list for being a white woman writing from a black maid’s perspective, but I struggle to understand exactly why.
She openly admits that to her shame no-one in her family, including her, ever even considered asking their own much-loved maid, Demetrie, what it felt like to be black in Mississippi working for a white family like theirs.
“I was taught not to talk about such uncomfortable things,” she says.
But as she grew up and moved away from the oississippi of her youth, she started wondering more and more what Demetrie’s answer might be.
And that’s why she wrote the book. Excuse me, but isn’t that progress?
Funny, warm, frightening, fabulous – one of my best recent reads.
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