"The Help" by Kathryn Stockett

I have just read what quite possibly could be one of the best books I've ever read - "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett. I've seen this book on shelves for months now, but never felt compelled to pick it up, despite the fact that every time I look it up on Amazon, it has a million 5 star reviews. What made me pick it up was that my dearest friend in the world happened to read it and raved about it. She polished it off super-fast, and handed it over to me this week, and I then got my turn to polish it off super-fast, and although I wanted to slow down and enjoy every morsel, I couldn't, because I just couldn't put the darn thing down. It was that gripping. I will definitely be re-reading this book at some point, and it's the kind of book I will be telling a lot of people about for the weeks to come. Wow, it was just SO good.

This is another one of those books that I don't want to spoil, so I'm not going to share much beyond the basic premise of the book. "The Help" is set in the early 1960's in Jackson, Mississippi, amidst the start of the civil rights movement, and is told by told black women who serve as maids and one single white woman who lives with her parents, having failed thus far to find a husband. The fact that the author could dip back and forth between these three very different protagonists's voices is just amazing to me.

Throughout the weekend, Husband complained that he was barely seeing me at all (in part because I spent a lot of time with my dear friend, and in part because when I wasn't out of the house with her, I was reading the book - even at the dinner table, which is a bit out of character for me).

My next book is Audrey Niggenegger's "The Time Traveller's Wife," which I've almost picked up a thousand times, but recently saw the trailer for the movie and decided I better read it, because the trailer looked awfully interesting. Speaking of trailers, I finally went to the see "The Hangover" this weekend with two friends, and I must say, it defnitely lives up to the hype. I can't remember the last time I laughed that hard, really. It was just positively hilarious. And since then, every now and again, I'll remember something from the movie, and it will crack me up all over again. I highly recommend it if you haven't seen it yet. And make sure to bring friends, that makes it even more fun. Even if you are the loudest people in the whole movie theater and when you leave, you're walking toward the bathroom, still cracking up, and some little girl says to her mom, "Mom, you should see that movie they went to see!"