Category: Books

The Help by Kathryn Stockett: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

The Help is Kathryn Stockett’s first novel. I loved it. I saw the film before I read the book – Octavia Spencer won a Golden Globe award as best supporting actress for her performance as Minny – and even though I knew the story I still found the book full of tension and completely absorbing. When I wrote about the film, I said I hoped the book lived up to my expectations. In fact, it did and more. As good as the film is, the book is even better and I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read for quite a while.

From the back cover:

Enter a vanished and unjust world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Where black maids raise white children, but aren’t trusted not to steal the silver…

There’s Aibileen, raising her seventeenth white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son’s tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue; and white Miss Skeeter, home from college, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared.

Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny. No one would believe they’d be friends; fewer still would tolerate it. But as each woman finds the courage to cross boundaries, they come to depend and rely upon one another. Each is in a search of a truth. And together they have an extraordinary story to tell…

My thoughts:

I didn’t find anything to detract from my enjoyment – even the fact that The Help is written in the present tense, which I normally don’t like, didn’t spoil it. I didn’t even realise it is in the present tense until I was well into the book. I think it’s better than the film because there is so much more in it, the characters are so well-defined, so believable, and the tension caused by the contrast between the black maids and their white employers is so appalling that I didn’t want to stop reading. The setting in Jackson in the early 1960s is tense to say the least. This book lives up to all the hype it created.

Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter are the three narrators and it is through their eyes that the book comes to life as they take turns telling their stories. As I was reading I could hear their voices.  Skeeter wants to be a writer and decides to write about what it is like working for white families from the coloured maids’ point of view. Aibileen is persuaded by Skeeter to tell her story in an attempt to change the prejudice and bigotry and improve the lives of the black population. Eventually other maids also tell their stories despite their fear of the consequences and the book is finally published. I was holding my breath as the story unfolded, would their cover be blown and how would the white women react?

It’s touching, poignant, funny, compelling and definitely thought-provoking. It’s a book that has stayed in my mind ever since reading it. I hope Kathryn Stockett writes more books!

  • My rating: 5/5
  • Author’s website: http://www.kathrynstockett.com/index.htm
  • Paperback: 464 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin; Reprint edition (13 May 2010)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0141039280
  • ISBN-13: 978-0141039282

The Burry Man’s Day by Catriona McPherson

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

This is the second in Catriona McPherson’s Dandy Gilver series.

Synopsis (taken from the back cover):

August 1923, and as the village of Queensferry prepares for the annual Ferry Fair and the walk of the Burry Man, feelings are running high. Between his pagan greenery, his lucky pennies and the nips of whisky he is treated to wherever he goes, the Burry Man has something to offend everyone wherever he goes whether minister, priest or temperance pamphleteer. And then at the Fair, in full view of everyone – including Dandy Gilver, present at the festivities to hand out prizes he drops down dead.

It looks as though the Burry Man has been poisoned – but if so, then the list of suspects must include everyone in the town with a bottle of whisky in the house, and, here in Queensferry, that means just about everyone …

Part of my interest in The Burry Man’s Day is that it is set in South Queensferry, on the south shore of the Firth of Forth, now part of the city of Edinburgh, formerly in the County of Linlithgowshire. I’ve been there once. It’s close to the Forth Road Railway Bridge:

Forth Road Railway Bridge

I haven’t seen the Burry Man’s Parade, which features strongly in this book; it must be a strange sight.

The book has a rather slow start, but it’s one I enjoyed for all its historical detail about the place, its traditions and the people. It has a great sense of place, with a map of Queensferry at the beginning of the book which helps you follow the action. I wasn’t very taken with Dandy Gilver. I liked her more in a later book in the series. In this book she comes across as a busy-body, albeit kind-hearted, and a snob, but then that’s probably just a reflection of the class structure of the times. She’s married to Hugh, who seems to spend his life hunting and shooting and managing his large estate at Gilverton in Perthshire. Dandy doesn’t have much in common with him, being rather bored by life at Gilverton and Hugh doesn’t feature much in this book.

This is Dandy’s second investigation and I suppose if I read the first book, After the Armistice Ball, I might understand her relation with Hugh and with Alec Osborne, her co-investigator. That’s one of the drawbacks of reading a series out of order.

There’s a lot more to this mystery than the death of Robert Dudgeon, who been the Burry Man for 25 years. He’d been extremely reluctant to take the part this year and the question  why was that remained unanswered for the majority of the book. I had an idea about the reason, but only guessed part of it. It’s a convoluted tale and the motive for the murder is buried deep in the descriptions of the characters and their histories. It’s a book you need to concentrate on, and at some points I did have difficulty in sorting out some of the minor characters. Other than that I think it’s a very good book, although maybe a bit too long.

  • My Rating 4/5
  • Author’s website: http://www.dandygilver.com/author.htm – where you can read an extract from this book
  • Paperback: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Robinson Publishing (30 Aug 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1845295927
  • ISBN-13: 978-1845295929
  • Source: Library book

Reading Notes

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

I seem to have a few books on the go at the moment, all at different stages.

I’ve recently finished The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which I think is absolutely fantastic and I need to write a separate post about it soon.

Before that I read Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, which I think is basically a book of two halves – more on that in another post, because I’ve borrowed The Sensation Novel from The Woman in White to the Moonstone by Lyn Pickett and I want to read that before finalising my thoughts on book itself. I found this book whilst looking for a biography of Collins and wanting to know more about him and his work. I hadn’t known about the sub-genre ‘sensation novel’ before, but apparently the 1860s was a decade of sensational events and sensational writing. So I’ve now started to read the Pykett book.

The next book I read is The Burry Man’s Day by Catriona McPherson, the second in the Dandy Gilver series. It’s crime fiction set in the 1920s in South Queensferry, full of local scenery. More about that too in another post to follow.

I then came to a halt, finding it difficult to find the next ‘right’ book to read. I’m part way into The Safe House by Nicci French, a psychological thriller about Samantha Laschen, a doctor specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder, asked to look after Fiona Mackenzie, a girl whose parents have been savagely murdered. I’m liking it, but I can’t read it in bed as the font is so small it hurts my eyes. I need to read it in daylight, so I had to find something else to read at night.

I’d started The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart, the third book in the Merlin series. I read the first two books years ago. They stand well on their own and I know the story of Arthur and Merlin quite well, so I was keen to read this book. Again it’s small font, so I’m limited to reading it during the day, or at least, not in bed. And somehow, it has not captured my imagination enough to keep reading it. I’m not abandoning it, just leaving it to one side for a while.

I’ve also dipped into to several others as well. It’s really annoying that when I’ve finished reading books that have had me spellbound, that I have to go through a time of indecision and am unable to settle properly with another book or that the font size defeats me. The answer I realised today is to read on my Kindle! I can increase the font if I need to and have a discreet light to read without disturbing my husband.

Earlier today I started The Bones of Avalon by Phil Rickman on Kindle and I’m happily engrossed in the world of Dr John Dee in 1560 and the missing bones of King Arthur. He’s on his way to Glastonbury accompanied by Robert Dudley (possibly the Queen’s secret lover – does he push his wife Amy to her death, but that’s another story). Just for the next 13 hours or so you can download it from Amazon for 99p – a bargain.

Tony and Susan by Austin Wright

Published on by Margaret

I read Tony and Susan by Austin Wright last November and parts of it are still vivid in my mind, but a lot of it has faded away. I’d put a few markers in the book, which act as pointers to sections I found notable, and which have helped to refresh my memory.

It’s a novel within a novel. Susan receives a manuscript novel, Nocturnal Animals, from her ex-husband. This is the outer story, which is nowhere nearly as interesting or absorbing as the inner story, her husband’s fictional tale of a crime, an ambush on the highway that leads to murder. Each time Susan stopped reading I just wanted to get back to the story of Tony Hastings and his family. It made me nervous as I was reading it and even more nervous went we drove anywhere, because Tony, his wife Laura and their daughter Helen were travelling on an Interstate going to their summer cottage in Maine when two cars in front of them blocked the lanes and forced them off the road. This does happen in real life, and the description is tense and vivid enough to make me believe it. It is terrifying.

The rest of the inner story is about Tony trying to get justice/revenge for what subsequently happened. There are questions on the back cover about why Susan’s husband sent her the manuscript, but the book doesn’t resolve any of these questions, which was disappointing. But I found it compelling reading and strangely enjoyable, if a little drawn out.  It was strange because that is Susan’s reaction as she reads about Tony:

This book has her in its grip, she can say that truly. The long, slow plunge into the evil night and Tony trying to brace himself by being civilised. The notion that being civilised conceals a great weakness.

…

She puts the manuscript back in the box, and even that seems like violence, like putting coffins into the ground: images from the book moving out into the house. Fear and regret. (page 110)

This is what this book is about – fear and regret – and also revenge. And it’s also about writing:

Once she asked him why he wanted to write. Not why he wanted to be a writer but why he wanted to write. His answers differed from day to day. It’s food and drink, he said. You write because everything dies, to save what dies. You write because the world is an inarticulate mess, which you can’t see until you map it in words. Your eyes are dim and you write to put your glasses on. No, you write because you read, to remake for your own use the stories in your life. You write because your mind is a babble, you dig a track in the babble to find your way around it. No, you write because you are shelled up inside your skull. You send out probes to other people in their skulls and you wait for a reply. (page 134)

There are more passages I could quote, but I think this one says a lot – and is long enough, anyway!

Tony and Susan was originally published in 1993. The author, Austin Wright was a novelist and Professor of English at the University of Cinncinnati. He died in 2003 at the age of 80.

  • Paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Atlantic Books (1 July 2011)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1848870221
  • ISBN-13: 978-1848870222
  • Source: I bought it
  • My rating 3.5/5

‘New to Me’ Books

Published on by Margaret13 Comments

I had a good time at Barter Books in Alnwick yesterday. Bartering books is a good way to recycle the books I’m not going to read again. I took in a box of books and came home with these. As I had built up a nice little sum over my last few visits, I was able to indulge myself!

Crime fiction

As you can see I was looking out for crime fiction and found three Agatha Christie’s I haven’t read:

  1. The Labours of Hercules – Poirot undertakes twelve cases before he retires to grow superior vegetable marrows.
  2. N or M? – a Tommy and Tuppence wartime mission.
  3. One, Two, Buckle My Shoe – Poirot investigates the death of his dentist.

I also got another Wycliffe book by W J Burley – Wycliffe and the Cycle of Death, in which he investigates the murder of a bookseller.

And another Perry Mason book by Erle Stanley Gardner- The Case of the Howling Dog – according to superstition a howling dog means a death in the neighbourhood, then both the dog and his owner are killed.

I’ve read one of H R F Keating’s books before but none of his Inspector Ghote’s books – this one caught my eye, Inspector Ghote’s Good Crusade, in which a millionaire philanthropist, the founder of a Bombay home for vagrants is murdered.

I’ve never read any of Sue Grafton’s books but have read reviews of a few, so I was pleased to find the first of her A-Z series – A is for Alibi. Kinsey Malone, Private Investigator has a cold case, hired by Nikki Fife, convicted of the murder of her husband eight years earlier, to find the real killer. If I like these there are plenty more in the series to look out for – and yesterday Barter Books had a shelf-full.

As I still had credit left I splashed out and bought two rather more expensive hardback books on crime fiction, which are at the bottom of the pile in my photo:

  1. The Great Detectives by Julian Symons, fictional ‘biographies’ of seven detectives, including Sherlock Holmes in retirement! I’ve been watching the fantastic TV series Sherlock, so my interest is very high right now.
  2. Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection by Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler. I’m really excited by this book, even though it’s over 30 years since it was published. It’s a big, heavy volume which I’m sure is an excellent reference book, containing biographies and bibliographies of crime writers and articles on films, plays radio and TV series and so on. I’ll be dipping into it regularly.

And because I do like to read other books than crime fiction I also got these two books:

How to draw anything

I’ve been attempting to draw and paint and this book, How to Draw Anything by Angela Gair makes it look easy, which of course it isn’t. But I’m hoping it will help me improve.

A Still Life Byatt

I looked briefly at the many bookcases of general fiction and was drawn (pun not intended!) to Still Life by A S Byatt. Maybe my mind was still on art but this book certainly caught my eye. It’s a novel set in the 1950s. The cover is Still Life with Coffeepot by Vincent Van Gogh.

The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

I enjoyed The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch, even though it’s a change from the type of books I’ve been reading recently. It’s the story of a young teenage boy, Miles O’Malley who is thirteen. He finds a giant squid dying on the mudflats at Skookumchuck Bay, at the southern end of Puget Sound, near his house. Such a rare creature causes intense interest and Miles is the focus of attention as he is pursued by TV crews wanting to interview him. The question is why has the squid been beached on the shore? What is happening out at sea?

It’s an easy book to read, even though packed with information about marine life, the ocean and tides, which Miles is passionate about. It’s narrated by an adult Miles, looking back at that summer he found the giant squid, when he had a crush on Angie, his ex-babysitter and his best friend, old Florence was getting sicker each week.

I’d visited Florence a least weekly for the past three years, in part because she increasingly seemed like the person most like me. She was almost as short and skinny but with huge bottom-fish eyes, as if she was designed to read in the dark, which suited her seeing how her gloomy home overflowed with books to the point stacks had to be moved to offer seats to more than one visitor. The clutter also added to the assumption that she was nuts. Most people didn’t know what else to call someone who called herself a psychic. My mother did. She called Florence a crazy witch. (page 47)

Florence, who is suffering from a variation of Parkinson’s disease, lives in a small steel-roofed summer cabin standing on stilts, washed underneath by the high tides. She predicts a superhigh tide in September. Miles is sceptical because September was known for mild tides. But Florence tells him:

‘Even science goes haywire sometimes, Miles.’ (page 50)

I was moved by Miles’s compassion for Florence, an old lady at the end of her life and his passion for the sea, whilst worrying about his parents’ divorce and his own troubles. It’s a beautifully written book about life, growing up, relationships and love. I was just sorry that this book had sat unread on my bookshelves for the last few years, but glad I did eventually get round to reading it.

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; New edition edition (1 May 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0747587620
  • ISBN-13: 978-0747579380
  • Source: I bought it
  • My Rating 4/5