book club: The Help

I really liked this book! There's been a lot of discussion on various sites about whether a white woman is qualified to write from the perspective of a black person, particularly in such a racist time in history. It didn't really bother me. One of the POVs is a white woman, and I sort of just imagined her writing the whole book. Maybe I would feel different if the author was writing about Pakistani women? I struggled a bit with the dialect of the maids, and agree with articles that have noted that none of the southern women had a dialect. But ignoring those concerns, and as a story--I loved it. I found the characters very believable for the most part.

The discussions were fun. We all had different favorite parts/characters. It's always interesting how perspectives can vary on the same damn thing.

( Spoilers--big ones. )

It was a fun meetup. This has been a pretty nice group of women so far. This was a particularly young group of women--20s and early 30s, but they didn't throw stones at me or threaten to burn me as a witch, so we fine.