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...
