![]() Skeeter tries to behave as a proper Southern lady: She plays bridge with the young married women edits the newsletter for the Junior League and endures her mother's constant advice on how to find a man and start a family. ![]() The Help, Kathryn Stockett's debut novel, tells the story of black maids working in white Southern homes in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, and of Miss Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, a 22-year-old graduate from Ole Miss, who returns to her family's cotton plantation, Longleaf, to find that her beloved maid and nanny, Constantine, has left and no one will tell her why. ![]()
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![]() ![]() We both looked into the water of the tarn. He looked at the grass and then up at me, indicating that this was not the quality to which he was accustomed. Hob, my horse, was grateful for the rest, but seemed annoyed by the surroundings. Madeline’s letter had taken over a week to reach me, and no matter how urgently worded it had been, five minutes more or less would not matter. I felt vaguely guilty about pausing in my trip to dismount and look at mushrooms, but I was tired. I had a strong urge to step back from them, and an even stronger urge to poke them with a stick. They grew out of the gaps in the stones of the tarn like tumors growing from diseased skin. The caps were clammy, swollen beige, puffed up against the dark-red gills. ![]() Perhaps it would not have been so unsettling if the mushrooms had not looked so much like flesh. I had seen it any number of times in dead deer and dying soldiers, but it startled me to see it here. The mushroom’s gills were the deep-red color of severed muscle, the almost-violet shade that contrasts so dreadfully with the pale pink of viscera. ![]() ![]() ![]() We open with fourteen-year-old Kit, her mother, and Dan, her new stepfather, in the car on their way to drop Kit off for a year at an arts-oriented boarding school.ĭan and her mother are all schmoopy with each other-they’re have googly eyes because they just got married-and Kit’s pretending to sleep so she doesn’t have to deal. These chapters won’t be every day-just the days that I suspect I won’t manage to do any other pleasure reading.Ĭhapter One: In which Kit’s new stepfather is a real turdlington. ![]() ![]() ![]() A specific number of pages, a short story, a single chapter of a Comfort Read, even-I never know what’s going to grab me and get me going again, off into the sunset with my book.Īs this has been the Reading Slump to Rule Them All, I figured I’d keep myself honest by posting about Down a Dark Hall-if Lois Duncan’s thrillers don’t count as Comfort Reads, I don’t know what does-as I go. Sometimes when I’ve been in a Reading Slump, I try to get back in the habit by making a point to at the very least DIP IN to a book once a day. ![]() |