Books read this year.....

unfortunately had many people recommend this to me, I read the little snapshots of praise stating that it was the next Gone with the Wind, and with that came to this book with great expectations. It was slow to get into at the start and was no To Kill a Mockingbird or Gone With The Wind (I believe that people just have forgotten what made these books classic and are prepared to cling to anything to try and attach their significance onto any book that has a similar theme).

Stockett does a fantastic job in certain elements of the book. At the same time she says at the end that she can in no way comprehend what it was like for people such those that served in the homes of the white families of the 1960s and with that in mind I did find the charactersiations of characters such as Minny in particular to be somewhat stereotypical. The book did have this sense of building up to something happening and then when that something was revealed it was something of an anti climax. The character of Miss Skeeter was a little unconvincing, in how she had no notions of what was actually going and how 'the help' were treated despite living in the South. It was as though instead of having been in the family and having returned after a few years of college to the family home, she had instantly eradicated all knowledge of the situation and was coming back to her home as though she had no prior knowledge of the treatment of the black characters in the book. Perhaps, as the ending is filled so much with the author's own retrospect on her own housekeeper growing up, this is the author's way of attempting to redeem her own self in living through Miss Skeeter a great deal

The language of this is akin the descriptive language of Lord of the Flies by Golding. Golding's book was one that I always had difficulty identifying with and this also had that element to it. The language is violent, brutal, the book is akin to its main setting - a wasteland on a hot day.