Since we had a book club meeting tonight, and it's exactly 4 months to the day since we discussed The Help, I (Kristin) figured it was about time I finally got on here and posted about it! Sorry for the delay!
Let me take you back. The day was August 15, 2011. I had turned 29 the day before. It was sweltering outside. (I assume. I don't actually remember, but let's never forget the hottest summer ever. Gross.) I had freaked everyone out at our last meeting by declaring that we didn't have any choices to vote between for our next book. I had chosen one book and that was that. But I knew everyone wanted to read The Help and the movie was coming out, so I was excited about the idea of pairing our discussion with a trip to the theater. When choosing the menu for that night, I wanted to try to make something new and something that fit with the Southern theme of the book, so I found a recipe for chicken and dumplings. And, of course, for dessert I made a chocolate pie. If you've read the book or seen the movie, you'll understand why. I used a slightly different recipe than Minny though...
When we sat down to actually discuss the book, we focused a lot on the effect of having multiple narrators on the story. We'd been exposed to that in Little Bee and I was interested to see if people liked it better or worse here. I definitely found both of our narrators in The Help to be more likable and thought it was great to get first person accounts of both sides of the stories. That same week, my Entertainment Weekly had a cover story on the movie and an editorial article on some of the negative aspects of this book, which honestly I hadn't thought about, so I brought that up and we discussed that a little too. After dinner, it was fun to see the movie, which we all thought was great, but definitely left out so much of what we loved in the book. So if you've only seen the movie, pick up the book too! The story gets so much deeper, especially the Constantine plot, and there are also way more laughs in the book.
Our scores were:
Stacey - 9
Camille - 9.5
Allison - 8.5
Erin - 9.5
Kristin - 9.5
Jen - 9.75 (conveyed to me by phone a couple weeks later)
Up next, Erin will fill us in on our discussion of Bossypants by Tina Fey!
