Capitol Hill Blue Forums Misc. Topics Book, Movie & Podcast Reviews my own book page

Interesting. I was a big Amazon customer several years ago. I've just been there once lately and that was 'cause a friend gave me a gift card. I'd wondered how the prices could be so much less.

I read The Help and while I found it very readable, I could never get past the believability gap. I am from Up Here instead of Down There and I may be completely wrong - but I just couldn't believe that in a town that bitterly hung up, that even one, let alone more than one, of the maids would have talked to a well-enough-off white girl, particularly given the things her mother was capable of. I have not worked in service but I know about apples not falling far from trees. If I would not have trusted her, why would the maids, who had so much to lose?

I was also not terribly comfortable with the idea that, of all the women in pain in this book, it had to be the White Girl Heroine that led the Poor Black Women to some semblance of freedom.

However - I am not from there, as I said, and that was just my take.

The story felt off to me, false somehow. But I'll take your word on the writing.

But I *will* tell you about a series I stumbled across while looking for reviews of The Help - it's a four-book detective series about Blanche White, a domestic worker who is raising her sister's two children. These are not smash'em crash'em detective stories, but they have a great deal of character development and they taught me some things.

The author is Barbara Neely, and the books are Blanche Cleans Up, Blanche on the Lam, Blanche Passes Go, and Blanche among the Talented Tenth. (and I'm sure that's not the right order, if order really matters.)

What hooks The Help and Barbara Neely together? Nothing, except at the end of The Help, I was tired of reading what white women thought black women felt - particularly about a time and place when the division between them was so great.

Oh - here's the column about the one that led me to the other...

Don't know about the movie casting, but I listened to this book during a few of my innumerable road trips. Enjoyed the story, and the books-on-tape performances were excellent.

Good points.

Related: I had an argument with my playwright friend, Jeff Sweet, along somewhat related lines. He'd written a play about a black woman (Southern) who demands more from her position as a nurse in WWII. He has her outwardly defiant, complete with shoulder moves, even when she is being court marshalled. At no level does she show fear. I questioned him about it based on reading and my southern experience. His theory was that risk-takers show up everywhere at any time. To me, the play still didn't ring true. I believe the character would have been better if fear was there and she acted in spite of it. But he was the writer, the play is based on a true story, and it has had a few well-received productions. And how does that relate to The Help? Moving in your direction, all the maids woulld have been better character if they had taken matters in their own hands. But at that time, in a relatively small MS town, would they have known what to do with the material if they had had the ideas themselves? No idea, but I see your concerns. It's a lot like Pepper Anderson (Policewoman) and the Charlie's Angels detectives always being saved by someone male. But they became only the lead-ins to Cagney and Lacey about female detectives who could and did take care of hemselves. Interesting.

Would they trust Skeeter? I guess I was willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of the story.

More tomorrow. My night put-me-to-bed lady just showed.

Guess all I had left to say was I checked out the Neely lady. She's up to 5 Blanche books now, and as soon as the un-reads are down to a single shelf, I'll order them. That's 5 books away.

I had trouble getting back into Gwen Cooper's Homer's Odyssey—it's the book I put down to read The Help—but mostly I'm glad I did. Homer's Odyssey—a Christmas present (Of course Christmas 2009)—is the story of Gwen Cooper's adopted-at-three-weeks-old, blind cat. A rather sappy theme of learning to persevere and live through the example of a blind cat runs throughout the book. But it does have other redeeming features:

1) Humor. The author already has two older cats when she adopts Homer. A description of Homer stalking one of the cats while standing right in front of her made me laugh out loud.

2) Tension. Gwen moved to New York and into a studio apartment a few blocks from the World Trade Towers. Nine-eleven happened and she was, of course, denied admittance to her neighborhood. I told myself I wasn't going to worry about three cats trapped in an apartment with a balcony and floor-to-ceiling window that could have shattered anytime during the horrendous day. But I did. And was relieved when the author got to them in time.

3) Amusing incidents: the tale of a rejected suitor who asks, "Does … does this mean I can't see Homer anymore?" (page 154)

4) Beautiful passages: "There are early-fall days in New York so staggeringly beautiful, so laden with the promise of fall beauty yet to come, that to experience them is, you tell yourself, worth all the money and hassle, all the striving and frenzy, that it takes simply to live in Manhattan." (page 184) I remember days like that.


All in all, Homer's Odyssey is pleasant—and a much easier read than the original.

Last night I read the collected writings from the 78th annual Writer's Digest Competition. Surprisingly—based on my having read the results for the past decade—several of this year's stories, articles, poems and scenes were quite good. Sadly, the judges do not seem to share my concern for the dwindling concern about writing details—like grammar and formatting.

So sayeth the dinosaur .

I have no idea how Elizabeth Tallent's Museum Pieces wound up on my unread-book shelf. Even after reading it, I still have no idea. I do, however, feel capable of "translating" the blurb that appears on the cover of the paperback edition.

I did, however, read all the way through it. There are some dog-eared pages, so amidst all those words, I must have found at least a few things interesting.

1) A female character was involved with a younger man. "… he claimed that meeting her changed his life. She didn't know how to explain that she liked his life the way it was, that she didn't want it changed by her—she couldn't shoulder such a responsibility." (page 97) A nice expression of disinterest in involvement, IMHO.

2) Something to think about: "Greta Garbo once said, 'I want to be alone.' Mia [a female character] doesn't believe it. How can anyone imagine they love being alone? Probably you can feel that if you are constantly sought after." (page 165) Interesting, but I'm pretty sure I disagree.

3) Huh? Mia is driving home with a man with whom she would like to spend the night. "She is a little awed with herself, that she wants to. The coffee is a faint bitter taste in the back of her throat." (page 170) When two sentences are that disconnected, is it still "good writing"? Yes, the two characters had had coffee, but they'd done so in the previous scene. Just wondering.

4) The author did make me grin—once. "He nibbled at the tendons of her throat; he was trying to give her a hickey. She told Tara it was like being eaten by Pac-Man." (page 177)

Several semi-unfamiliar words in this one:

1) "He probably looked real scrabous." (page 4) www.dictionary.com has no listing but lists "scabies mite home remedy" on the page. Rough looking? Scabby?

2) "…he bought her a frozen yoghurt." (page 81) I didn't know yogurt could be spelled more than one way. But I had learned from another book that yogurt is close to clabber, a dairy product I remember eating as a kid on the eastern shore of Virginia.

3)
I never knew pieces of broken pottery had a name.

Oops. Sorry about that one, Martha; it's one of my favorites - I think that's how you ended up with it.

Oh well. I'll try again. I've just finished "The Keep" by Jennifer Egan. She has a new book out that's getting good reviews ("A Visit from the Goon Squad), but I didn't want to start with that one, so I picked up "The Keep."

This is one of those books that will mystify me for a long time, so rather than try to describe it I'll link to an NYT review. I think I read it in three days - she's good at cliff-hanging the chapter endings (grrr.)

I have no idea whether or not she's a great writer but I thought the book was, well, fun. The review compares it to Fowles and that makes sense in that Fowles always fascinates me right up to the last page, and then frustrates me because I still don't really understand the damn book.

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/books/review/30bell.html]link[/i]

Fortunately I bought the new one at the same time.

(Hope this makes up for "Museum Pieces." I can't help the fact that nothing happens in the book; it's part of what I love about it.)

I believe the word is supposed to be scabrous, which does mean "rough to the touch". If the author was trying to use a real word and not just make up her own word.