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I loved it, sorry, but I really did. It is heartwarming and heartbreaking and a bit heart attack inducing when you encounter some of the characters who deserve nothing less than a big kick up their bigoted behinds.

Set at the beginning of the 1960's in Jackson, Mississippi it is the story of three women and the friendships that develop between them. The notable detail is the fact that two are black servants and one is a white woman of the Jackson gentry. The story is told through the accounts of the three women as they move through their different lives but all growing closer and closer in the action that binds them together; the gathering and writing down of the accounts of thirteen black maids for publication in a book ' The Help ' by a New York publishing house.

It is powerful because Stockett manages to create three fairly distinct voices for her heroines and each contributes in her own individual way to the unfolding of the story. The dialogue is, in part, really funny and filled with life and character and at other times astoundingly moving.

However there are a few caveats to my praise. There are rather a lot of peripheral characters who do not add much to the overall moving forward of the plot and confuse the situation somewhat and some rather ridiculous sub-plots which are just total nonentity cul de sacs. Yes, naked man in the garden, i am talking about you.

Whenever i encounter huge pantomime-like villains, or in this case villainesses eg Miss Hilly, my 'is this really believable' gene kicks in. She seemed too petty, vicious and unnecessarily cruel all mixed up into one to be real and her position as Queen Bee seemed ridiculous because why would someone so stupidly egocentric and foul have ever got to the position of fashionista anyway. How did Skeeter, who admittedly at the beginning of the novel was a bit of a WASP though maybe without much of the protestant part, come to be friends with the hideously nauseous Hilly and the crassly stupid Elizabeth. I spent a good deal of her sections attempting to understand how she could ever have been mates with the two of them.

There were some moments of a delicacy and sensitivity which actually took my breath away; the encounter of Skeeter with the perpetually disregarded depressive who was one of the very few white women who shone in terms of her goodness and relationship with her maid and the lesson Skeeter took from that conversation was lovely, the beauty of the burgeoning relationship of Celia, Johnny and Minny climaxing towards the end of the book was truly lovely and I loved the throwaway line of the publisher concerning the Minny character in the book ' She is every Southern white woman's nightmare; I adore her '. She did shine as a great creation as indeed did Abilene.

The publisher herself was something and nothing, a total caricature of hard headed business woman who actually just came across as rude, arrogant and uncaring. One of the premises of the novel was how the white women of Jackson were all scrabbling around desparately trying to see whose chapter referred to whom and the machinations the writers go through to attempt to protect identities.

The thought did cross my mind that Kathryn Stockett has not got the same ability to obfuscate the proceedings; this is her first novel and so presumably the heartless bitch of a publisher knows exactly who she is. Equally presumably Mrs Stockett is banking on two million copies sold protecting her from the cold wind of reprisal and revenge.