2009 book 41

Kathryn Stockett's The Help
This novel--about a young white woman and two black maids who embark on a project together in Mississippi in 1962--has gotten mostly positive reviews and has already shot onto the bestseller lists. I will say that it's very readable, though I had a few problems with it--primarily that it squicks me out when white authors write from the POV of black people and use dialect. I think I would have given this a B+, but then I read the author's note at the end about how she loved her own black maid when she was growing up in Mississippi, and that made everything just awful and pretentious and white liberal guilt-ish. I don't know why her editor let her include it.