Ok I feel dirty. I, along with everyone else in America, succumbed to Kathryn Stockett's The Help. It is actually quite hard to put down. It's a story of African American maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960's told through their voices and then the voice of a young white woman who writes a book of their stories.
The voices of the maids are very engaging but the author's intentions are less so. She panders to the liberal white readers, you're allowed to feel comfortably superior to the white Southern women who employ 'the help'. It skims over any real danger involved in these women's lives and then has the effrontery to try to make the white woman character in some way noble because she doesn't have a boyfriend, has literary ambitions and has bad hair. It never challenges or provokes us, just flatters.
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