I am currently taking a civil rights class, and this book complements it nicely. So far, I am enjoying the book both because of the amazing determination the author shows in getting an education despite the odds, but also because of the incredibly frightening first-hand accounts of the horrors of racism in the Deep South in this time period.

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Now that I'm finished (silly school slowed me down a lot) the only thing I have to add is that I wish it hadn't ended where it did. I know she went on to fight more battles and do more good work, and I wanted to read about it. I'll just have to go see if she's written anything else.

This is what I wanted The Help to be. I feel uncomfortable with fictional books on racism that become popular because the main character is a white person that heroically saves a POC. I prefer to hear about racism from a black perspective. This is a true story about Anne Moody growing up in rural Mississippi and the institutionalized racism that keeps her family in poverty. She ends up being bravely involved in the Civil Rights Movement. This book is gritty and real. She tells her story without embellishment and it is raw and horrifying. It should be required reading in schools. One of the best books I've read on the Civil Rights movement. I loved it!

caveat - I stopped about 2/3rds of the way. The style was so emotionally flat that it "evened out" the horror of the racism she was enduring, and the events she was witnessing, with the effect of almost sanitizing them. This was compounded by Moody coming across as self-centred (at least) and arrogant (at worst). The reconciliation scene with her mother was a case in point: she acknowledged she had behaved horribly but then ... kept behaving horribly, and with the shallowest, most egotistical excuse. Also, she described things from such a distance that it was kind of hard to get connected to them - and very hard to get connected to her, since she was so cut off from her own emotions.

Now, of course, that kind of affectless response to horror in the re-telling s a classic product of trauma, but here's where I say to every memoirist: yeah, but ... the story needs you to tell it.

I couldn't even keep going to the point where she becomes an activist. Maybe something would have clicked for me then, but really, at the most it would have meant a strong finish to a book that was inconsistent, slow, poorly-written and unengaging despite its massive potential to be exactly the opposite.