The Help by Katryn Stockett

Although The Help was published in 2009 I did not know about it until it was listed in New York Times Bestseller List for the month of June 2012. I love to check out the synopsis of each book that made it to the list and if the plot or contents look interesting, I'd download the ebook. (Obtaining books used to be slightly more irksome as it requires a trip to the local bookstores and sometimes you go away disappointed as they don't have the title you want.) The Help looked promising. 

Set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, The Help is about African-American maids working in middle-class white households. The story is narrated by three strong and courageous ladies: 

a) Aibileen, who takes care of Mae Mobley, a two-year-old daughter of Elizabeth Leefolt; 

b) Minny, who is always loosing her job due to her sassy mouth and who now works for Celia Foote, whom the society ladies referred to as 'white trash';

c) Eugenia 'Skeeter', daughter of a cotton plantation owner and journalist wannabe.

Skeeter had graduated and returned home to find that Constantine, the black maid who raised her, had disappeared. No one would tell her what had happened.

Meanwhile, she applied for an editor's job with publishers Harper and Roe. The senior editor, Elaine Stein, called her personally to tell her that her application was rejected, but she was encouraged to write a  book on a subject that was interesting and mattered to her.

Rallying the help of Aibileen and Minny, Skeeter started on her book about what it is like for black maids to work in white households. Secret trips were made to Aibileen's home where interviews with the maids were held. 

As the story unfolded, I was hooked and reeled in like a fish. The 'voices' of Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter were distinct from each other and believable. But most of all, it was the inhumane and racist treatment of the African American maids that got to me. I had never imagined that the whites in America was so racist in the early 1960s. I had to google to verify the facts.

'Blacks are dirty and have disease' was the constant thing you heard. They did not allow a black maid to use the toilets in the house, nor allowed to use the same cutleries or plates as them. Everything was segregated. They had shops for the blacks and shops for the whites. As long as a black woman was not wearing a white uniform signifying that she's shopping for her white mistress, she was not allowed to enter the stores for the whites. In the story, when a black guy was caught buying petrol from a white petrol kiosk, he was beaten almost to death, never mind that he didn't know it was a white petrol kiosk.

It really made me wonder, why are people so uncomfortable with the colour black? And I don't mean only the Africans. Black cats are shunned, too. They are the least adopted, and the myth of their bringing bad luck to a household is propagated throughout the centuries.

Book Review: 1222 by Anne Holt

I've never read Anne Holt's work before even though she's a best-selling novelist. That's because she's a Norwegian author, and her novels are all written in Norwegian. So English readers like me are lucky when her eighth installment of The Hanne Wilhelmsen series was translated into English.


After having read Snow by Orhan Pamuk, also another translated work, Anne Holt's 1222 is a refreshing change. It draws you in, unlike Snow. 


Although it's a crime thriller, it is not one of those action-packed novels that I like. Rather, it is reminiscent of Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes. It focuses more on solving the puzzle of the crime instead of the crime itself. That said, I do like Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes, too, so if there is going to be anymore English-translated work of Holt's, I'll be sure to read them.


1222 is the name of a hotel atop a mountain near a train station. The story begins with a snow blizzard that caused the train to derail. The survivors were rescued and taken to Finse 1222. Snowed in and unable to go home, people started to die. 


Amongst the survivors was a former police detective Hanne Wilhelmsen. Paralysed from waist down due to a bullet that hit her 12th and 13th verterbrae, she tried to work out who the murderer was from a long list of suspects.


Even though I am more a fan of fast action novels, somehow the narration of 1222 managed to draw me into the story and it was one of those hard-to-put-down books. Imagine this....my nose was buried in my Kindle as hubby and I walked along Jalan Telawi in Bangsar.....

Operation Mincemeat by Ben Mcintyre

Upon finishing Agent Zigzag by the same author a month ago, I started right away on Operation Mincemeat. I usually take less than one week to finish a paperback of 600 pages. However, April and May have been particularly busy months, and the weekends were no different. There was always one obligation after another. I was surprised to note that I took one month to finish Agent Zigzag and another month to finish Operation Mincemeat. At the rate I'm reading, it's going to take me more than one lifetime to finish all the books I have!


Operation Mincemeat was the codename of a very bizarre deception carried out by the British Intelligence to fool the Nazis.  One of the person involved in the deception was Ian Fleming who was in Room 35 of the Admiralty, the nerve center of British naval intelligence. He later went on to write the James Bond spy novels.


And his colleague, Charles Fraser-Smith, was the inventor who provided Ian Fleming with equipments for his more outlandish plans. Needless to say, Charles Fraser-Smith was responsible for the character 'Q' in the James Bond novels while 'M' was based on Admiral John Godfrey.


The deception involved getting a corpse with no family and dressing it up as an officer and floating it off to the Spanish shores with planted intelligence documents to fool the Germans about the Allieds' invasion plans.


I particularly enjoyed the first half of the book. Stephen King couldn't have been more macabre. 

Bentley Purchase came up with a solution. "I've got it," said the coroner. "We'll get an electric fire and thaw out the feet only. As soon as the boots are on we'll pop him back in the refrigerator again and refreeze him."

 The mouth of the corpse has fallen open. The skin around the nose has sunk, and the upper part of the face appears discoloured. The fingers of the left hand are bent, as if clawing in pain.

......a person was formally pronounced dead without ever having been alive.

I don't normally quote paragraphs from the books I read, but those passages just stuck in my mind.


Read together with Agent Zigzag and The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva, one has a better understanding and appreciation of how a war could be won even before it actually began. History lesson has never been so interesting, dead bodies do tell tales. 


And now I'm going to start on a fiction that has nothing to do with war....time to take a break from history.  Should I read The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson or Snow by Orhan Pamuk, or......

Book Review: Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre

A friend who read a review that I wrote on The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva suggested that since I enjoyed reading about British double-cross espionage during World War II I might like Agent Zigzag, a true account of love, espionage and betrayal . And she was right. 


While I had learned a fair bit about how the British concocted a very daring and remarkable deception plan to deceive the Nazis, Agent Zigzag completed my 'education' and I knew all the spy masters by name now, if not their complete personality, on both the British and German sides. Well, almost, anyway. There is one more deception, a very famous dead body operation called Operation Mincemeat, which I will write a review on when I finished reading it.


Eddie Chapman was the most unlikely hero I had ever come across. He began his life as a criminal and was a member of the Jelly Gang who used chewing gum to stick the gelignite to the safes on their heists. 


And yet, he was also a gentle criminal. He abhorred the use of violence in his crimes. He was also a very charming young man, and made friends easily, both of the female and male gender. This was a man with two fiancées at the same time! 


He was serving a sentence in Jersey when the Nazis took control of the island. And so began a story that was more astounding than fiction. His British handlers codenamed him 'Zigzag' due to his erratic personality.


The book's account is taken from documents released by the British Secret Service MI5 to the UK National Archives in 2001 and is a must read for fans of espionage. 

Book Review: Girl In Translation by Jean Kwok

Girl In Translation is a refreshing book, profound in its simplicity. Kimberley, the protagonist, migrated from Hong Kong to the U.S. with her mother at a very young age and lived in extreme poverty in the squalors of Brooklyn, with no heating in their roaches and rats infested apartment. To keep warm during the cold winter, they turned on the oven in the kitchen and piled layers after layers of clothes over themselves. They also did not speak much English and Kimberley struggled for a very long time in school. 


Although the characters and the plot are fictitious, nevertheless such extreme poverty exists. It's stark in its bleakness, but in the end, Kimberley triumphed and rose above her station to give her mother a better life, at the expense of her own love life.


In fact, when I read about the author's early childhood in her website, it was as if she had written a memoir in Girl In Translation, and just changed the name of the protagonist.


This book managed to transport me into a different world, and I was totally engrossed in the struggles of this young, brave, talented girl. I would not be surprised if some movie producer contacted the author for film copyrights. If a film is made based on this novel, I would definitely watch it. That said, I'm looking forward to more books from this author.

Book Review: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Usually, I prefer to watch a movie first, then read the book if I like the movie. But in the case of Never Let Me Go, I read from the comments in IMDB that it is better to read the book first before watching the movie. One movie-goer even went so far as to say that if you haven't read the book you won't understand what the movie is about as a lot of the details were left out.


Well, I've read the book but haven't got around to watching the movie yet. It's still sitting there in my computer. Never Let Me Go is told from the perspective of Kathy, one of the three protagonists. They were clones though they were not sure if they were modeled from a real person. Their purpose for existing is to be organ donors, though Kathy and her two friends, Ruth and Tommy, yearned for a normal life.


Sounds familiar? Yes, it is along the same lines as the movie "The Island". But unlike "The Island", the clones did not escape.


They didn't have their freedom curbed like the clones in "The Island", but they never made any effort to escape. It made me think and wonder why. I guess perhaps they were afraid to leave the world they know and venture out into the unknown? So many opportunities were lost, and in the end, Kathy was left with questions like what if they had done something before it was too late.


It also makes me think deeply of how sometimes science chooses to ignore the obvious. A clone is also a human being, not a "creature" to be reviled like a spider. He or she has emotions, just like a real human. What right then, do we have for creating a sentient being only to ask him to serve his purpose for existence by donating his organs and when the critical organs were donated, the clone shuts down (the term is referred to as 'complete' in the book) and is only kept alive with the aid of machines until the very last organ has been donated? It sounds pretty inhumane to me. I hope in the real world, science won't get that far.