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Jacksonville, Mississippi, circa 1963. The black people have some problems: They get shot on their front lawns, beaten half to death for accidentally using the white man's bathroom and are being lynched for speaking up about civil rights. A white 23-year-old girl has a problem: she doesn't have a boyfriend. Or a job, so she decides to write an expose of Southern life.

Yes, I am over-simplifying the plot here, but that's the basic crux of it. White girl is writing the black maid's stories about what it is like to be good enough to raise whitewomen's children and make their Thanksgiving turkeys, but diseased enough to not be able to use their bathrooms.

The Help is a runaway smash hit. But it's not very well written. The author Kathryn Stockett, is (so stunningly obviously) a white lady trying to write in authentic black voices...Occasionally it seems like she gets it right but most of the time, I'd say not.

And the other issue is that the white women in the book all speak the Queen's English. I mean, sheesh. I have Southern friends who's every other word is "y'all" I think I counted 2 "y'alls" spoken by white women in the whole book.

If an author is going to attempt to capture an era of slang, dialect and vernacular, it should be consistent. And this is just one quibble I have with the book. My other issues with The Help is that it's trite, predictable and I have read this story, better told more than once. This isn't literature... it's pop fiction, and not very well written pop fiction at that. It's unbelievable that this book is being compared to To Kill A Mockingbird or Gone With the Wind.

No less than 5 very well-respected friends recommended this book to me. I kept reading because I kept thinking that it had to get better. It actually got a bit worse toward the end. At least the end isn't wrapped up in a pretty, sugar coated bow, which I was actually bracing myself for.

Apparently this book was rejected by 50 publishers before G.P. Putnam's Sons for Penguin picked it up and it became a smash. And with this new climate in publishing where e-books are taking over the way illegal downloads changed the music industry forever, this book will not be made into an affordable paper version until January 2011. If you must read it, at least wait until then. You won't be missing anything.