"The Help" by Kathryn Stockett

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, was one of those super popular books that actually stood up to its hype.  It was the most interesting book I've read in a while.

While it wasn't always page-turning, it engaged me completely.  I loved the interesting perspectives, the harsh historical details, and the completely foreign setting.  I loved rooting for the good guys.  Parts were absolutely heart-rending, especially the pain these maids faced, practically raising white kids, loving them, but all the while waiting until they turn into their prejudiced mothers and fathers.

Some people have complained that the book misrepresents the time, the area, the people.  I'm not from the South, so I don't know.  I grew up in a small town in Arizona, where I was never aware of much White-Black tension, though maybe I was just naïve.  I also wasn't born until a while after the sixties.  So I'm not really qualified to speak to the matter, but I feel that it was handled well.  Neither the maids nor their employers in The Help were all saint or sinner.  And while the situation in Jackson (and other places) was ugly in the 60s, I don't think it's something we should ignore.  Prejudice and bigotry are by no means dead, and the more empathy we can have with each other, regardless of race, social position, politics, gender, nationality, sexuality, religion, lifestyle, etc., etc., the better.

As for the dialect, that's been called racist too, especially since the Whites didn't drawl on paper.  I'm really sorry if people took it that way, but I thought it was really well done.  It wasn't distracting and hard to decipher, as I find much dialect in writing.  I could really hear the characters' voices.

I watched the movie after the book.  While it's a good movie, it can't compare to the book (of course, what movie can?).

Great premise.  Great details.  Great writing.  Great job, Kathryn Stockett.

My rating:  5

Click here to buy The Help.

Click here to learn more about Kathryn Stockett

Winter in Vsetin

These days in Phoenix, when it's a high of 57F (14C) and everyone's about to die of cold, I think of beautiful, beautiful Vsetin, Czech Republic, and REAL winter.

Here's where I walked a mile to work every day::

A walk along the Bečva, in Vsetín, Czech Republic 

That's ice coating those trees.

Vsetín, Czech Republic

Vsetin, I miss you!

"When Calls the Heart," by Janette Oke

When Calls the Heart, by Janette Oke, is a historical romance set in frontier Canada.  A city girl from the East goes to teach school in Calgary, where her half brother lives.  Immediately assigned to a country school, she learns to adapt to the wilds and love her sweet school children.

The whole book is a little too sweet to be real.  Everyone is so nice and noble and giving except the one school superintendant man who only has a short appearance in the book.  The hero's nearly perfect.  All her students are too well behaved—and eager to learn—to be quite believable.  Still, it's a nice, gentle, CLEAN romance, not just between a man and a woman, but between a frontier school teacher and her new home and her humble students.

My rating:  4

Anticipation

When I was little, I spent all December playing with the wrapped gifts under the tree.  I rearranged them by giver, by receiver, by wrapping paper, by size.  I stacked and restacked and shook and poked, all the while wondering what lay inside.  I could hardly sleep on Christmas Eve.  I burned with anticipation.  In the morning, we were barred from the living room until Mom put on a scratchy old Christmas record and turned the tree lights on.  Then we'd emerge into a wonderland of toys and gifts.  Though not extravagant by many people's standards, it was fantastic to me.  I loved Christmas morning, but I also loved the anticipation of all those many days before.  And maybe, just maybe, I loved the anticipation more.

Now it's not Christmas that gets me rearranging things for hours, dreaming of what will come.  It's travel.  I spend hours rearranging my search criteria on travel websites, entering different dates for a flight abroad, different ports for a good deal on a cruise, researching cheap hostel options and public transportation routes in new cities.  I browse guidebooks and websites and talk to other travelers.  I can spend hours and hours on my vacation before I ever set foot out the door.  That anticipation feeds me.

I booked my first cruise five weeks before departure.  Those five weeks were a blur of happiness.  Happiness and packing.  My Dad joked that I was getting at least $100 of fun out of it before I ever got on the ship.  And that made it a very cheap cruise. 

I once traveled budget style around Central America for six months.  You should have seen me hunting down Permethrin to do a long-term insect repellent treatment on my bed-sized mosquito net, waterproofing my shoes, shopping for clothes that were light-weight, wrinkle-free, and quick-drying, for all the sweat and hand washing and hauling everything around on my back.  The trip lasted for six months, but the joy of it started a year before and hasn't ended yet.

Memories let you live an experience twice.  But anticipation lets you live it three times.

Why Pandas Do Handstands, by Augustus Brown

I don't read a lot of non fiction books, to be honest, but recently I've been terribly fascinated by the adaptability of animals, and how their bodies are so perfectly suited to their lifestyles, or how their lifestyles are so uniquely adapted to their strange bodies.

This book has a lot of great tidbits.  Did you know there's a fish that grows at a rate equivalent to a human baby becoming an adult six times the size of the Titanic?  Did you know that elephants may be able to communicate with other elephants 20 miles away by stomping on the ground?  

Why Pandas Do Handstands:  And Other Curious Truths About Animals will give you hundreds of fascinating tidbits like this.  The writing style gets a bit repetitive, as do some of the facts, but overall it's a fascinating look into the adaptability of animals.

My rating:  4

Click here to buy Why Pandas Do Handstands, by Augustus Brown.  

"Runaway," by Alice Munro

I'd never read anything by Alice Munro, though she's quite the famous author.  This is one of her collections of short stories, and when my friend Marla lent it to me, she described the first story as "disturbing."  The whole book is indeed rather dark and somewhat dreary, with long slow descriptions that are beautifully written but not always terribly engaging.

Some of the details and ideas are quite interesting, and I love the Canadian settings.

My main issue is with the endings.  They are all very anti-climactic.  Not just literary anti-climactic, where not everything gets prettily resolved and not everyone lives happily ever after, but truly anticlimactic--no bang at the end, as if there should have been more but she just got tired and quit.  Maybe this is to reflect real life and the way true stories don't all tie up in nice bows at the end, and we don't always learn things or grow or even find nice little poetic twists to our own personal tales.  Unfortunately, I want an END, so it's disappointing not to get one.

Still, I think Alice Munro is a good writer, and I would read more of her work someday.  Click to learn more  about Alice Munro.

My rating:  3

Czech "Tramping"

I love the four-seasons beauty of the Czech Republic and the people's great love of nature.  It's one of my favorite things about living there.

For a little more about it, see my article on Czech "Tramping" in In the Know Traveler.

Summer landscapes near Vsetin, Czech Republic