The Help is set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963 and 1964 during the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. There is some talk about what is going on around them such as the murder of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, but the book centers around two black maids in particular and the white women they serve. Aibileen is the maid for Elizabeth Lefolt and basically raises Elizabeth’s daughter Mae-Mobley. In fact, her favorite part of the job is helping to raise the children ever since her own child was killed. She tells Mae Mobley that she is kind and smart like she wants to drill those notions into her because Elizabeth just can’t be bothered to show any affection to her own child. Elizabeth is friends with Hilly Holbrook, the president of the Junior League, and they have their bridge club every Monday at Elizabeth’s house.

Hilly is the supreme racist and ultimately the antagonist or villain in the book. Toward the beginning of the novel, she starts an initiative to install separate bathrooms out in the garage for the maids because they shouldn’t be using the same bathrooms the whites use in the house. Another member of the bridge club is Skeeter Feelan who is also the editor of the Junior League newsletter. She wants to be a writer and in order to get something on her resume, she starts writing the housecleaning column for the Jackson newspaper. Of course she doesn’t know anything about cleaning so she starts asking Aibileen for some help. Skeeter doesn’t have the hangups about race that everyone else, especially Hilly, seems to have, and she is disgusted by Hilly’s comments on the matter.

Aibileen’s best friend is another maid named Minnie. Minnie is sassy, no-nonsense and she has to watch what she says around her white employers so that she doesn’t get into big trouble from. She is fired from Hilly’s mother’s employment when Mrs. Walters has to go into nursing care. The way Hilly fired her so incensed Minnie that she did something to Hilly that becomes one of the cruxes in the whole plot. Hilly tries to get her barred from employment anywhere in Jackson, but Minnie manages to find work for a previously poor (but has married up), outcast woman named Celia who desperately wants to fit in with Hilly’s group, but Hilly doesn’t want anything to do with her.

This sets the background for the main story. Skeeter comes up with an idea to write a book about the good and bad things the black maids have encountered while working for white women. It is tremendously risky and horrible things could happen to both Skeeter and any maid that helped out by being interviewed for the book. Only Aibileen, at first agrees (reluctantly) to help, and Aibileen finally convinces Minnie to help as well. The struggle is to try and get a dozen maids to agree to be interviewed. It takes a horrible thing done to Hilly’s maid for a good number of them to get on board.

I thought this book was very interesting, and I especially enjoyed listening to the Audible version. It was read by four different women; one who read Skeeter’s chapters; one who read Aibileen’s chapters; one who read Minnie’s chapters; and inexplicably a fourth that read one chapter about a memorable Junior League Gala Benefit. One of the readers even played that character in the movie version. All of them did a fantastic job of narrating, but I really enjoyed the Aibileen and Minnie chapters the most. Stockett has faced some controversy and criticism for writing from the African American perspective, but I think she wrote a really compelling story about an important time in recent American history.

(Jen also reviewed this book back in 2006. -Editor)

Here is another review of a book that was recently turned into a movie and the movie was actually a pretty good adaptation. In the first chapter of the book Susie Salmon is murdered in the cornfield on her way home from junior high school by her neighbor Mr. Harvey. The entirety of the book is told from Susie’s point of view looking down from her heaven watching how her death affects her family and the friends she had made. We also learn a bit about Mr. Harvey’s background and his serial raping and murdering of young girls. The crux of the story, though, is how Susie’s family deals with her death.

Susie’s dad had a very close bond with her in life. She would help him with his hobby of building sailboats into bottles. Her own hobby and aspiration was to become a wildlife photographer and she liked to take pictures of everything. When Susie died, he smashed all of his bottles and became obsessed with finding her killer. With a little help from Susie’s spirit in heaven, he became convinced that Mr. Harvey was the one who had done it, but he had no evidence to prove it except for a gut feeling. Susie’s mom withdrew into herself and became distanced from the rest of the family even having a brief affair with the detective on her daughter’s case. Susie’s sister Lindsay was on her dad’s side in the matter. Susie watched her sister grow up, and was proud of her gifted intelligence and prowess in running. Finally there was Susie’s little brother Buckley who was too young to understand about murder and death at the time Susie died. How the family dealt with Susie’s death was probably the most interesting thing about this book.

Susie also had friends at school. At the time of her murder she had just recently experienced her first kiss from a boy named Ray Singh. Unfortunately Ray became one of the first suspects in the investigation because of this relationship, but it was clear that he was not involved and he even had an alibi of being out of town when the murder took place. From heaven Susie would watch her family and friends grow up, go to high school, and have experiences she wishes she could have also taken a part in.

I thought this was a pretty good book, although it was a tear jerker at times considering the whole topic. There was only one kind of weird thing at the end that veered a little bit toward the supernatural where Susie takes control of a body of Ray’s friend (they are not exactly girlfriend and boyfriend at this moment) to make love to Ray one last time. It was an interesting scene, but kind of weird in the scope of the rest of the book. However, the ways different people cope with death and especially a death as grisly as Susie’s was very interesting.

This was a very hard book to listen to. As a matter of fact I had attempted to listen to it once before and stopped about an hour in.  Last night I finished listening it. It is not a very long book, only 136 pages or 5 hours in the audio version, but the language and situations depicted in it are highly vulgar, but very real.  The novel Push was made into the movie Precious, which in itself was a very hard movie to watch.

This whole story takes place in Harlem, New York in the 1980s. The book is told from the perspective of Clarice “Precious” Jones.  She had her first baby from her father at age 12 and her second baby also from her father at age 16.  Her father had been having sex with her since she was 7 (that she can remember) but there is a line toward the end that the abuse may have started much earlier when she was in diapers.  Not only was she raped by her father but her mother beat her while she was having her first baby on the kitchen floor.  Remember she’s only 12 years old when this happens. It is beyond horrible that this poor girl did not get a normal childhood.  Living with her mother has been an absolute hellish existence.  The first baby is severely mentally retarded and has Down Syndrome.  Her grandmother takes care of little Mongo (short for Mongoloid).  Her second baby Abdul is a healthy baby and Precious is determined to take care of him herself.

The book has redeeming qualities also which started to make it more compelling for me.  Precious never was very good at school. When the book opens she is 16 years old and in the 9th grade and has no idea how to read and write.  She sits in the back of math class.  She is sent to principal’s office and is suspended for being pregnant which she is angry about because it is not her fault.  The principal comes to her house and talks through the intercom at her about an alternative school Reach One Teach One on the 19th floor of the Hotel Theresa.  Precious wants to learn so she enrolls in the program that teaches remedial reading and writing.  There are about 7 girls in this class all, we find out later, with similar horror stories as Precious.  It is taught by a teacher named Blue Rain.  She becomes a mentor to Precious and teaches her the alphabet and how to read and write in a journal every day.  Precious even gets an award from the city for her progress and moves out of her horrible home into a half way house.  There is hope for her until she hears from her mother that her father has died of AIDS and you know where that is headed.

It was a very hard book to listen to, but after awhile it became so compelling that I wanted to finish it. Sapphire (AKA Ramona Lofton) is a very poetic writer, at times making the book sound like Slam Poetry, and the book is so steeped in realism that you are sure stories like this really happen to people, even as horrible as it may seem.  There is also some commentary about welfare, unemployment, and other issues related to poverty that make this an interesting book as well.  Overall I ended up liking it for the issues it brought up and that little bit of hope that Precious got at the end.

Rarely there is a case where the movie adaptation is better than the book.  This is how I felt about Up in the Air.  The movie was entertaining, funny and thought-provoking and George Clooney brought a lot to the role of Ryan Bingham.  Unfortunately, the book fell flat on all of those points for me.  I think I was most disappointed with how unfunny the book was compared with the movie. The book carries a more business-like tone.

Ryan Bingham is a frequent flyer who works for a company called ISM doing CTC, but he would rather work for a company called Myth Tech.  These acronyms are confusing and I kept having to go back to the page where they are first mentioned  to figure out what they mean.  CTC is Career Transition Counseling, in other words he helps companies lay off people.  ISM stands for Integrated Strategic Management.  Unlike the movie, Bingham’s job of firing people is rarely mentioned.  Towards the end of the book he meets a lady who he helped fire a long time ago in Dallas who remembers him well, while he has completely forgotten her.  Most of the book revolves around his frequent flying and a little bit about his sister getting married.  Even the movie treated that aspect of his personal life in a more fleshed out way.  This book goes on and on about meeting different business associates, flying and his loyalty to Great West airlines vs Desert Air, and hanging out in hotels.  Bingham is also working on a business novel called The Garage about an inventor who toils alone, but out in the real word people are taking his innovations and making a fortune.

I think my major problem with this book is that I’m not a business person and so as a result of that I was kind of bored by the whole thing.  I wasn’t bored enough to stop reading as I am on some books, but I was much more entertained by the movie than this book and  that is rare for me.  Generally the books are better than the movies.

A lot of the books I review for this site have movies based on them.  What happens most of the time is that I see a movie I like and then I want to read the book.  I know some people would rather read the book before seeing the movie, but for me the opposite is mostly true.  Sometimes the movies are very faithful to the books and sometimes they are completely different.  Nora Ephron’s movie version of Julie and Julia incorporated aspects from this book while interspersing another book about Julia Child’s life.  Julie and Julia, the book, is all about Julie Powell.

I listened to the audio version of this book and will say up front that it is abridged, although I don’t know how abridged it is.  Here is the general story:  Julie Powell is a secretary in a government office across from the World Trade Center in New York City after 9/11 so she is fielding calls from family members and other angry people.  In her home life, she finds a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child at her mother’s house in Austin, TX.  She takes it back home to New York and her husband Eric gives her the idea of doing a blog post (this is 2002 before most people knew what blogs were). She gets the idea for a project where she will spend a full year making every recipe in the book and blog about it.

Along the way, the reader is treated to the trials and tribulations of Julie Powell. Other reviews have remarked that Julie comes across as whiny and full of herself, but that didn’t bother me so much.  There were parts of the book that were very funny and I enjoyed her sarcastic sense of humor.  I think the highlight on that account would have to be the section where she has to deal with cooking lobster.  Yes, I also felt sorry for her husband Eric for having to put up with her crying fits and tantrums, but at least Julie was honest enough to be straight forward about all of that stuff and you can tell that she feels gratitude toward Eric for sticking by her.

Several weeks ago I got to hear Julie Powell speak at the Texas Library Association convention.  That is one of the reasons I wanted to listen to the book and I’m glad I was most of the way through it by the time I heard her speak because there were many references to the book in her speech.  She was very down-to-earth and humble about her new fame. The Q&A after the speech was most interesting because she talked about meeting Meryl Streep on the set, if she and Eric were still together after two books (the other being Cleave written after Julie and Julia) about testing their marriage, and what her favorite recipe from the book was (beef bourguignon) and least favorite (aspics).  It was a very enjoyable and highly entertaining speech and I’m glad I got to hear it.

If you can get over the whining and narcissism in the book, I would recommend reading it or better yet listen to Julie Powell read it.  It is a pretty fun, light book to read.

I don’t have much real world knowledge of people with schizophrenia except from what I see in such movies as A Beautiful Mind or Proof.  This book gives a good perspective on the condition and the challenges associated with it, not only for the person afflicted, but for those who care for them as well.   Social workers must be some of the most caring and patient people in the world.

Steve Lopez is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times who, while on his way to work, stumbles onto this homeless man in one of the tunnels in L.A.   He is playing an old, beat up violin with 2 strings, but Steve can see that the man has talent.  After talking with the man a little bit, Steve learns that the man, Nathaniel Ayers, went to Julliard.  Lopez can’t believe this and after doing some research and calling the school finds out that what Ayers was saying is the truth.  This starts one of many columns about Nathaniel Ayers and a long lasting friendship.

Nathaniel has a way of rambling when he talks, jumbling many different ideas from Beethoven to Steve Lopez to Cleveland, where he’s from originally, to New York and L.A.  He lives on the street in the Skid Row section of Los Angeles and has to tap a couple sticks on the ground at night to scare the rats away.  Steve Lopez takes it upon himself to try to get Nathaniel some help through LAMP, a non-profit organization in L.A. devoted to ending homelessness.  Through Steve’s columns, readers donate cellos and violins to Nathaniel and at one point he has 6 instruments.  He keeps the cello, violin, and his original 2 string violin in his shopping cart that he carries with him everywhere.  He is very paranoid, despises smokers and cigarettes with a passion, and can be horribly racist on his bad days.

The book is really interesting in that Steve talks to mental health workers to get their varying opinions on what to do with Nathaniel.  Opinions vary so widely because mental health is so varied from person to person.  It’s not easy and it takes more than a year, but Steve slowly starts to see Nathaniel start to move inside to an apartment which he resisted so vehemently at first.  He also starts to learn more about Nathaniel’s back story, his time at Julliard, and his family.  He also struggles with trying not to spend too much time with Nathaniel so he can have time with his own wife and his new daughter.

I enjoyed this book.  Nathaniel has such a passion for music and relishes it when Steve takes him out to the Walt Disney Concert Hall.  It was interesting learning about homelessness and schizophrenia in one of the worst cities for homelessness as well.  The movie version was very similar to the book and I couldn’t help picturing Robert Downy Jr as Steve Lopez and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayers while I was listening to the book. Of course the book had more information and more details.  If you enjoyed the movie or have an interest in the mental health profession you should check out this book.

This book was published in 1971 and it was amazing to me that the prologue was set in Northern Iraq.  In the prologue a priest who is along for an archaeological dig  gets his first encounter with the ancient demon that plays a bigger role at the heart of the story.  The book is about a famous movie actress Chris McNeil who lives in the Georgetown area of Washington D.C.  She has a pre-teen daughter named Reagan.  Other people in the house include Sharon, the tutor and Chris’ secretary, and Carl and Willie, husband and wife servants from Switzerland.

Reagan starts to be visited by what Chris thinks is an imaginary friend named Captain Howdy. It starts innocently enough through the Oija Board, but soon Reagan becomes inhabited with the demon. She begins shouting obscenities, shaking the bed in convulsions and then wetting it and exhibiting multiple personalities.  This is where the book becomes both very interesting and ultimately frustrating.  Chris starts taking her to the family doctor. The doctor is convinced she doesn’t need psychiatric help, that what is wrong is a physical condition with the body.  They do all of these tests on her, give her Ritalin, and theorize that she may have Frontal Lobe disorder in her brain.  When all of the tests come up negative, the doctor has to concede and refer her to a psychiatrist.  They can’t do anything either except give her Librium to try to calm her down.

One evening Chris has a dinner party and meets Father Carris for the first time.  He is a Jesuit priest and a specialist in psychiatry and eventually becomes involved in the Reagan case.  Also in the meantime a movie director friend of Chris’ is found dead outside her home and a detective begins coming around asking questions.  Reagan has deteriorated to the point of being strapped down to the bad and is visited by many demonic personalities and can speak in many different languages.  By this time the book starts to become a little frustrating because I’m saying “Do the exorcism already!” Father Carris want to make absolutely sure Reagan is possessed before he gets permission from the church for the exorcism.

It is an interesting book from a psychological/psychiatric perspective and how all of these doctors try to rule out every kind of mental disorder. There is also some interesting exposition about the history of satanism, possession, and exorcism.   The demonic scenes are kind of fun to read also and how the demon tries to trick and cajole Father Carris.  I listened to the audio book and it was narrated very well by the author. He had some great accents for some of these characters where it really did play like a movie in your mind.  The characters are well developed enough that the reader can identify with them.

This is not actually a book, but more of a short story contained in a collection called Tales of the Jazz Age.  After having just watched the movie, I decided to read the story. It was a quick read; it probably took about an hour to read the whole thing. I was wondering how they could make an almost 3 hour long movie from a short story and here is the answer: the only thing similar between the two is that Benjamin Button ages backwards.  Everything else is completely different.

In this story, Benjamin is born in 1860 in Baltimore, Maryland right before the Civil War to a hardware retailer. His father arrives at the hospital and the doctors and nurses are just horrified by what has been born and when the father says who he is everyone treats him scornfully.  The baby is an old man and when he can talk he asks his father for a cane.  Unlike the movie, the father doesn’t give Benjamin up, but instead dyes his hair to make him appear younger.  One kind of racist thing in this story (of course you have to think about the time it was published, 1922) is when the father is walking with Benjamin by a slave trader he secretly wishes his son had been born black so he could get rid of him.

At age 18 Benjamin tries to enroll into Yale College, but he has run out of hair dye.  He goes to the interview with his natural hair, he probably looks like he is in his 50′s or 60′s, and is basically thrown off the campus. No one believes he is freshman age. It’s kind of funny that the Yale freshman taunt him to go to Harvard.  Shortly after this he gets married to the daughter of a general, Hildegarde.  Their marriage goes along fine at first and then Benjamin tires of her so he enlists in the army for the Spanish American War.

The story further documents the exploits of Benjamin as he grows older in age and younger in appearance. He has a son who he soon bypasses as in he looks the same age as his son and then starts to look younger than his son.  His son in his thirties doesn’t want anything to do with Benjamin as he is an embarrassment to the family looking like a teenager.  No one seems to understand nor want to believe that Benjamin can’t control what happens to him and they all seem to think he is doing this on purpose.  That part is very strange.  It is a very interesting story though and night and day different from everything that happens in the movie.

This is what spurred me on to start reading Gaiman.  Shawno did a contribution on my Rental Reviews of the movie version of Coraline. Even though it was a negative review, the storyline intrigued me enough to rent the movie version. I enjoyed the movie and wanted to read the book so I downloaded it on the Kindle for iPhone app.  Then, after following Neil Gaiman on Twitter, I learned that The Graveyard Book won the 2009 Newbery award. I decided to listen to that book first.  So that is the back story for this review.

Coraline is a little girl who has just moved into this house with her parents.  It is a house which is broken into several apartments or flats. Downstairs at the basement level is the home of Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, two ex-actresses who live with their Scottish Terriers.  Upstairs at the attic level lives a crazy old man, we don’t learn his name until the end of the novel, who trains rats to play musical instruments. Coraline and her parents live on the ground level, but there is also an empty flat.  Coraline is on summer vacation and is bored. Her parents are writers and want to be left alone to write so Coraline does a lot of exploring.  One day she discovers a small door in the drawing room that never gets used. She asks her mother for the key, but discovers that there is just a brick wall on the other side.  That night she hears scurrying of tiny little feet and she follows the sound to drawing room. She opens the little door and discovers that the wall is gone and it leads somewhere.  Going through the door, she winds up in another drawing room similar to the one she just left.  In this new world she discovers her other mother and other father. The cat she met in the real world can now talk and eventually plays a sizable role in the story.  At first her other mother is very nice and serves delicious food, but Coraline soon discovers that she is evil and wants Coraline to stay in this new world and have buttons sewn on to her eyes like everyone else in this world.  The other mother also takes her real parents and Coraline has to figure out how to save them. In the process, Coraline learns how to be brave and that she really does have a nice life in the real world.  There is a really interesting story about bravery Coraline starts telling the cat about when she was little and her father saved her from a swarm of bees by staying and getting stung so she can run to safety.

I would like to do some quick comparisons with the movie version.  First, the little boy character in the movie Wybie is completely absent in the book; he was just a creation for the movie.  Second, I think her real parents come off as slightly nicer in the book version at the beginning than the parents in the movie.  Her mother in the book takes her shopping, albeit for bland clothes and helps her with the key for the small door and her father cooks which she hates because he likes to experiment from recipes.  The book has wonderful, scary imagery of the other world, and the cat seems to have a bigger role.  Coraline’s interactions with the cat were probably my favorite scenes.  I would have to say the end of this book is definitely a page turner and I finished it in just a few days.  I really have enjoyed reading Gaiman’s young adult books and may have to try some of his adult books like Stardust or Neverwhere in the future.

It is very interesting to me to compare books that have been made into movies. Why did the screenwriters/director/producers decide to delete or modify parts of the book? I understand that there is no way for a complete book to transferred to the screen because the movie would last many hours, but it is interesting to look at and think about the differences between movies and the books they are based on.

With that said, one of the first things that surprised me about this book was its length. I listened to the unabridged audio book version and it was a little over 18 hours long. My wife and I listened to the book on our car trip to Arkansas (a 12 hour trip) and we listened both going there and coming back. Obviously we didn’t listen the whole 12 hours there and back because when we got home there was still about 2 hours left in the book. I finished the ending on my own.

On to the review itself. The basic plot is similar to the movie. A scientist at CERN in Switzerland has discovered AntiMatter which is a little free floating speck of light in a tube. There is a polarity in everything. If you have matter you must also have antimatter. If antimatter were to touch matter (anything solid, liquid or gas) a huge explosion would occur. Well it is discovered that the scientist who discovered it is found murdered and the antimatter tube is stolen. The hero of the story, Robert Langdon, is called to CERN because he is a Harvard professor who specializes in a secret, ancient cult called the Illuminati. Apparently the scientist has been branded on his chest with an ambigram (a symbol where the words can be read either right side up or upside down) of the word “Illuminati”. Here is the first time where the book detours from the movie. The movie shows the scientist at CERN murdered and the antimatter stolen and Langdon goes straight to the Vatican. In the book, Langdon goes to Switzerland, examines the scientists body, meets his daughter, is given a tour of the Hadron Collider where the experiments take place, learns the antimatter has been stolen and then he and the daughter, Vittoria, fly to Rome.

Once Langdon and Vittoria are in Vatican City, the real action begins. The pope has died and everybody is gathered at St. Peter’s Basilica to see the new pope become elected. However, four cardinals who are the top contenders for pope have been kidnapped and each one will be murdered and branded with the ambigrams earth, wind, fire, and water an hour apart starting at 8 pm. Langdon must use his Illuminati knowledge to follow the path to the four churches in Rome where the murders are to take place and try to save the cardinals from being murdered.