book club: The Help
Jun. 14th, 2011 08:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
verbicideI 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.
As mentioned in comments with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
margotheangel, the only thing I had a real issue with was with Minny actually baking her own shit into a chocolate custard pie. I found it unbelievable from just about every perspective--that such a taste and smell could be disguised, that Minny would dare to do such a thing to a vindictive white woman and then TELL HER about it, that Hilly wouldn't have Minny literally killed for such a thing--even if she didn't want the community to know what had happened. I also can't personally believe that even someone as horrible as Hilly was as a person deserved such a thing, considering that it could have given her hepatitis or salmonella or E.coli and have possibly killed her. (Most of the book club women were totally fine with it, which I thought was sort of funny.)
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.
The discussions were fun. We all had different favorite parts/characters. It's always interesting how perspectives can vary on the same damn thing.
As mentioned in comments with
margotheangel, the only thing I had a real issue with was with Minny actually baking her own shit into a chocolate custard pie. I found it unbelievable from just about every perspective--that such a taste and smell could be disguised, that Minny would dare to do such a thing to a vindictive white woman and then TELL HER about it, that Hilly wouldn't have Minny literally killed for such a thing--even if she didn't want the community to know what had happened. I also can't personally believe that even someone as horrible as Hilly was as a person deserved such a thing, considering that it could have given her hepatitis or salmonella or E.coli and have possibly killed her. (Most of the book club women were totally fine with it, which I thought was sort of funny.)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.
