A Very Enjoyable Story

I haven't enjoyed a book this much in a long time. I understand that it has been criticized on several levels but keep in mind that it is FICTION. The movie also comes out on DVD next Tuesday. I will be watching it.
I hope some of you will try this book. I expect you to enjoy it as much as I did!

From Widipedia:
The Help is set in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi and told mainly from the perspective of three women: Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter. Aibileen is an African-American maid who cleans houses and cares for the young children of various white families. Her first job since her own 24-year-old son was killed on his job, is caring for toddler Mae Mobley Leefolt. Minny is Aibileen's confrontational friend who frequently tells her employers what she thinks of them. Her actions have led to her being fired from 19 jobs. Minny's most recent employer was Mrs. Walters, mother of Hilly Holbrook. Hilly is the social leader of the community, and head of the Junior League. She is the nemesis of all three main characters.




Miss Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is the daughter of a prominent white family whose cotton farm employs many African-Americans in the fields, as well as in the household. Skeeter has just finished college and comes home with big dreams of becoming a writer; her mother's big dream for her is to get her married, although Skeeter is not interested. What does interest her is that Constantine, the maid who raised her, is nowhere to be found: Skeeter's family tells her that Constantine abruptly quit and went to live with relatives in Chicago. Constantine had been writing to Skeeter the whole time she was away at college and the most recent letter had promised her a surprise upon her homecoming. Skeeter does not consider Constantine's unexplained absence a good surprise and wonders what happened, but nobody will discuss Constantine.



This discussion awakens Skeeter to the realization that her friends' maids are treated very differently from how white people are treated. She decides that she wants to reveal the truth to the world from the maids' perspectives by writing a book about it. Written in the first person from the perspective of Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter, the struggles Skeeter experiences to communicate with the maids and gain their trust is revealed, as well as the issues of overcoming long-standing barriers in customs and laws by all of the characters. The daily lives of Southern homemakers and their maids during the early 1960s in Mississippi are explored. The dangers of undertaking writing a book about African-Americans speaking out in the South during the early '60s hover constantly over the three women.

South of Broad

This is the Pat Conroy book that I am reading and it is getting good!

Excerpt from Chapter One:

On June 16, 1969, a series of unrelated events occurred: I discovered that my mother once had been a Roman Catholic nun in the Sacred Heart order; an Atlas moving van backed into the driveway of a nineteenth- century Charleston single house across the street from ours; two orphans arrived at the gates of St. Jude’s Orphanage behind the cathedral on Broad Street; and the News and Courier recorded that a drug bust had taken place on East Bay Street at the Rutledge- Bennet house. I was eighteen, with a reputation as a slow starter, so I could not feel the tectonic shift in my fate as my history began to launch of its own volition. It would be many years before I learned that your fate could scuttle up behind you, touch you with its bloody claws, and when you turn to face the worst, you find it disguised in all innocence and camouflaged as a moving van, an orphanage, and a drug bust south of Broad. If I knew then what I have come to learn, I would never have made a batch of cookies for the new family across the street, never uttered a single word to the orphans, and never introduced myself to the two students who were kicked out of Porter- Gaud School and quickly enrolled at my own Peninsula High for their senior year.
But fate comes at you cat-footed, unavoidable, and bloodthirsty. The moment you are born your death is foretold by your newly minted cells as your mother holds you up, then hands you to your father, who gently tickles the stomach where......





I have to get back to the novel...the main character has been confronted by a psychotic stranger in an alley, who is apparently the father of the new girl next door. And...he has a knife.

Purple

I just finished reading this book. It is very different from the movie version (that I've seen about 10 times). There's a lot to think about in this book. I haven't decided if I would really recommend it to everyone. I might recommend to someone I knew very well. There are some odd concepts, I guess I mean "foreign concepts to me" that are brought up. I know nothing about being so poor, uneducated, black and female during the 1930's. What a hard life. But....the main character does triumph. Hmmmm, a lot to think about....
Did you know that purple can be the color of brutality and violence, and it can be the color of beauty and joy?

Sigh of Relief

I have finished A Thousand Splendid Suns and......I'd like to recommend it to you all. I almost didn't pick it because of my experience with the author's first book but I am so glad I did. It had a wonderful ending, even though the journey was tragic and unbelievingly realistic. It was worth becoming an empathetic voyeur for a brief time. The story of how these two women, from different backgrounds, became "family" is a universal theme that I couldn't ignore. So, I have spent several hours doing research on Afghanistan and I'm completely intrigued. I'm learning about the history,culture and food. I wonder where this leads?

I would welcome ideas.

Oh, and I would really be interested in some book suggestions. What do you recommend?

I'm still reading and still holding myself together

I am 3/4 the way through my book and I still have things in perspective. Yes, some of the events have been tragic, and there is foreshadowing of extremely heartbreaking situations, but I am beginning to really cheer for the 2 main characters. They have just received potentially good news ( a return from the dead so to speak). However, the Taliban has just come into power.
Dare I hope?

I  figured out why this book has not been such emotional torture for me, the way Kite Runner was. In Kite Runner, the main characters are children, totally helpless, vulnerable children, with their entire futures shaped by the events in their childhood.

This book has a major difference for me. The 2 main characters are women, still vulnerable in the Afghanistan society, but not completely helpless.

I have a glimmer of hope for them. I'll finish the book this morning, so I'll let you know soon.

It's time for: an intense experience

I picked up this book from the library yesterday. I read the author's first novel, Kite Runner, a few years ago. He is an amazing writer but the plot was very hard to handle emotionally for me. It left me heartbroken and despondent the entire time I was reading. I experienced grief and hopelessness as if the events were really happening in front of me. That is a mark of a great storyteller. I never wanted to experience that again but......here I go. On the cover, this book is proclaimed as "the saddest story yet". Great, wish me luck.



I read about 100 pages yesterday and I've been sad but I'm still able to put the story in perspective (as in,....fictional). I have a feeling that I'll be in trouble (deep empathy) when the Taliban comes into power. Why do I do this to myself?
Here's some information if you think you'd like to read this novel as well. Experience it with me if you will.


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Thousand Splendid Suns is a 2007 novel by Afghan author Khaled Hosseini, his second, following his bestselling 2003 debut, The Kite Runner. It focuses on the tumultuous lives of two Afghan women and how their lives cross each other, spanning from the 1960s to 2003. The book was released on May 22, 2007, and received favorable prepublication reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist, as well as reaching #2 on Amazon.com's bestseller list before its release.
The title of the book comes from a line in the Josephine Davis translation of the poem "Kabul", by the 17th-century Iranian poet Saib-e-Tabrizi:

Every street of Kabul is enthralling to the eye
Through the bazaars, caravans of Egypt pass
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs
And the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls


Time magazine's Lev Grossman placed it at number three in the Top 10 Fiction Books of 2007, and praised it as a "dense, rich, pressure-packed guide to enduring the unendurable". Jonathan Yardley said in the Washington Post "Book World": "Just in case you're wondering whether Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns is as good as The Kite Runner, here's the answer: No. It's better."


^{A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan’s last thirty years—from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to the post-Taliban rebuilding—that puts the violence, fear, hope, and faith of this country in intimate, human terms. It is a tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal lives—the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness—are inextricable from the history playing out around them. http://www.khaledhosseini.com/hosseini-books-splendidsuns.html}

Book reviews, Author review

*the following review may contain some "spoilers" for those who want to read these books*

I recently got on a roll and read three books by the author Jodi Picoult. I tried "Nineteen Minutes" first. Her writing style really caught my attention and the story did too. It was about a school shooting and 5 or 6 characters got to tell the story in their own words, even the shooter himself. Very sad though...

Next, I read "My Sister's Keeper". This was the saddest of the three books that I sampled. It told the story of a terminally ill child whose younger sister was conceived for the sole purpose of saving her sick sister with her platelets and bone marrow etc. The younger sister finally sued her parents for the right to have a say in all medical decisions concerning her own body. By the second book, the author's style of having all the characters tell the story in 1st person (by chapters) got a little frustrating to me. I just wanted to hear from the main character the most.

Extremely sad ending...

The last book I tried was "Change of Heart". This novel told the story of a convicted murderer who may not be exactly guilty. He apparently had a special "spirituality" that he presented at times, and wanted to donate his heart to the little sister of his victim-after he was executed. The concept was so reminiscent of the book " The Green Mile" that I wondered if Stephen King thought about suing. I admit to skipping some of the chapters because they were told by some of the minor characters. I guess I just wanted to get to the heart of the story. This book had a bit more of a happy ending than the others I read.

If you don't mind really sad endings, or the fact that the stories are told piecemeal by many characters, then you probably will enjoy these books. I did enjoy them but was left feeling very sad, and a little hopeless. I'm not sure if I'm ready to read any more of Jodi Picoult's books for a while, but will probably check one out in the future.

My favorite book, a review

This is my favorite book in the whole world and if you haven't read it, please take time to at least read some excerpts. And, if you have seen the movie instead, don't let that stop you-it is actually almost 2 different stories.

Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell (her one and only book).

This is the story of the South during the Civil War era. Scarlett is the oldest daughter of well-to-do plantation family in Georgia. She is privileged and spoiled (and mean, revengeful, without conscience, willful, manipulating and so on......she's a very complicated character). She is all about saving herself and her childhood plantation while trying to win the love of Ashley, another woman's husband. The book is about poverty after wealth, toiling to feed oneself, crooked business practices in fear of going bankrupt, turmoil, death, upheaval, and determination to survive. She learns what it is like to be poor, starving, to lose friends and family, to actually love someone other than herself (of course that would be Rhett Butler).

Characters:

Scarlett-beautiful on the outside, wicked and self centered on the inside. You will both love and hate her.

Melanie-plain on the outside but magnificent on the inside. She has more substance than Scarlett would ever have. She is also married to Ashley, the man Scarlett convinces herself she has to have.

Ashley-the gentleman of the "Old South" who is forever saddened and changed by the war.

Rhett-the "scoundrel" who sees Scarlett and Melanie for who they really are. He disdains the South and the Civil War but joins the cause at the end of the war in spite of himself.

Keep in mind that the movie is just a skeleton of what the book actually is. Wonderfully written, heartbreaking, humorous, sad and intriguing. You will feel like you lived through the Civil War yourself.