The Help-16

I usually don't like these books about how blacks used to be treated before the civil rights movement, for me it's usually repetitive and monotone, I still feel they are important, but I normally dislike reading them. However, this book was an exception to the rule.

I have said in one of my comments once that I enjoy books where the main character(s) is(are) well developed and feel like something more than words on a page. When characters are developed in this way they eventually become dear friends to the reader, and you start to really care about what happens to them. If the writer achieves this all the content in his/her book becomes infinitely more valuable, in suspenseful moments the reader's heart starts to beat faster and they get an adrenaline boost along with the character, when a character dies the reader feels genuine grief. In my opinion it is this that separates good writing from masterful writing.

In the past I have read countless "good" books, but only a handful of "masterful" ones. Even in the masterfully  written books I have read usually there are only 2 characters developed to the level I described, the best of them have 3, and upon consideration I'd say the record is 6. This development usually occurs over a series of books, and the record for fully developed characters in a single book was 2.

Why am I rambling on like this? Notice that I said the record for fully developed characters in a single book was 2, this book has 3.

This book's author, in the course of a single novel, managed to create three unique, fully developed, interesting characters, while still having an interesting plot and not stretching on for thousands of pages. That is an accomplishment that in itself made the book a good read. The characters were not the most developed I have ever seen, however the fact that this author was able to create 3 in a single (approximately) 500 page book is a sign of unbelievable talent.

I also enjoyed the twist of the book being about how the characters conspired to write a book about how they were treated by the white people they worked for and published it with the title of
The Help." I'm a bit strange so I don't know about anyone else but this twist amused me to no end.

The actual "treatment of the blacks" part of the novel contained no new concepts to work with, by and large it was all the same, though I must admit some of the white actions against the blacks were particularly hateful, even for this type of book. Despite the particularly strong discrimination presented it boils down to the same things we all have understood for years.

So maybe there were no great revelations about white and black relations in this book, but I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys this type of book, and possibly to some people who would ordinarily not read it.