I really wanted to like this book. I wanted to enjoy it as much as I had To Kill a Mockingbird because they have similar themes. Being black in the south was (and still is in some places) almost a death sentence, your life is crammed into a box of prejudice and there isn't a way out. I was hoping for a book that would show how a group of women made there way to a brighter future, instead I was handed the one thing I fear about books with female leads... I was given boredom. I rarely have good fortune with woman as protagonists. They always do the insipid pitty party and it annoys me.
Female leads always lean toward depressive episodes, emotional fits of tears, gossip mongering, and salacious deeds of misconduct. As a woman, it ticks me off! In The Help, we have two black women who work for white women, they do everything except wipe their pearly back-sides. The women do what they can to not try and rise above their "station" as servants. Enter the white girl outside town. She wants to make her way out of her role as a female, she doesn't want to marry and have kids. She wants to write, which endeared her to me, but only slightly. I felt she used these women to excel herself, pushing them into saying and doing things they normally wouldn't have.
Maybe its just that I was insanely bored by this little novel, but I didn't care to read it when it came out, fearing the massive amount of estrogen contained therein. I really did want to enjoy this book, but alas, it was literary algae. It looked great, but had no substance.
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