Mudbound

Synopsis: When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place both foreign and frightening. Henry's love of rural life is not shared by Laura, who struggles to raise their two young children in an isolated shotgun shack under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law. When it rains, the waters rise up and swallow the bridge to town, stranding the family in a sea of mud. As the Second World War shudders to an end, two young men return from Europe to help work the farm. Jamie McAllan is everything his older brother Henry is not and is sensitive to Laura's plight, but also haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the farm, comes home from war with the shine of a hero, only to face far more dangerous battles against the ingrained bigotry of his own countrymen. These two unlikely friends become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.

Review: I really enjoyed this one, great storytelling and a good cast of characters. From the first paragraph I was hooked.

'Henry and I dug the hole seven feet deep. Any shallower and the corpse was liable to come rising up during the next big flood: 'Howdy boys! Remember me?' The thought of it kept us digging even after the blisters on our palms had burst, re-formed and burst again. Every shovelful was agony - the old man, getting in his last licks. Still, I was glad of the pain. It shoved away thought and memory.'

The story is told from the viewpoint of six characters - Jamie, Laura, Ronsel, Florence, Henry and Hap and they each have their own alternate chapters. It starts with the burial and then we go back to find out what happened to bring them to this point. Laura is city born and bred, at 31 she thought she was on the shelf forever, 'a spinster well on my way to petrifaction' but then she meets Henry McAllan. They marry and have two children but Henry's love of rural life soon leads him to buy a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta and Laura is given two weeks to prepare for their new life. Unfortunately, it won't just be the four of them, Henry's Pappy is to join them there. Pappy is the most snide, sly, malicious, hate filled old man that you could ever be saddled with as a father in law. They christen the farm Mudbound ... 'When I think of the farm, I think of mud. Limning my husband's fingernails and encrusting the children's knees and hair. Sucking at my feet like a greedy newborn on the breast. Marching in boot-shaped patches across the plank floors of my house. There was no defeating it. The mud coated everything. I dreamed in brown.'

Whilst Henry is nothing like as bad as his Pappy, he does share some of his unphilanthropic views. Henry's younger brother Jamie however is entirely different, he's charming, handsome and just that little bit wild and unpredictable. Despite the differences in their temperament Henry idolises his brother and Laura too finds herself attracted to him. Jamie's been away fighting in WW2 and has only lately joined Henry, Pappy and Laura at Mudbound. Hap and Florence are sharecroppers on Henry's farm, their son Ronsel has also been away fighting in WW2 but when he comes back home to Mississippi he finds nothing has changed. He finds black folk are still picking cotton, begging white folk's pardon and riding in the backs of buses. This is at odds with the relative freedom he has become used to in Europe, people were curious there because they were not used to seeing black people but once they became accustomed to him he was treated as an equal.

As well as racism of the dirtiest and most bigoted kind there is also polite racism, Laura comes to like and respect Florence but there are limits ... 'This is not to say that I thought of Florence and her family as equal to me and mine. I called her Florence and she called me Miz McAllan. She and Lilly May didn't use our outhouse, but did their business in the bushes out back. And when we sat down to the noon meal, the two of them ate outside on the porch.' ... The racial tension builds and builds in a land where the Klan are still very much in operation. Because of their shared wartime experiences Jamie and Ronsel become friends but this ultimately put's them, Ronsel especially, in great danger.

The ending is shocking and unsettling but you really do feel it coming and so it's not entirely unexpected. The author really breathes life into her characters and places, I felt like I knew the people well (all of those that narrated anyway) and could envisage Mudbound in all it's mud soaked, storm battered, soul sucking glory. A difficult read because of the subject matter but a totally engrossing one.

The Help (Audiobook)

Synopsis: Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid, Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her 17th white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women - mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends - view one another.

Review: I loved this book, it is absolutely perfectly read especially by the three women voicing Skeeter, Minny and Aibileen. Set in Jackson, Mississippi during the early 1960's when the civil rights movement was in it's infancy, it tells the tale of two black maids Aibileen and Minny.They've worked for white families as 'the help' for most of their lives, looking after their children as if they were their own and putting up with the sly remarks, insults and prejudice of the women they cook and clean for.

Miss Skeeter wants to be a writer, she has a job working for the local newspaper writing cleaning tips (as she still lives at home with her Mum and Dad, cleaning and household management is something she knows next to nothing about, but she asks Aibileen, her friend Elizabeth's maid, to help her). Skeeter feels uncomfortable over the way her friends treat 'the help' and she hits upon the idea of writing a book, that will tell the story of what it's like to be a black maid working for a white family. She needs to get as many of the maids as she can to tell her about their experiences, she will give them pseudonym's of course and she will write it anonymously. When she approaches Aibileen with this idea Aibileen is skeptical, infact she's adamant she won't do it and neither will any of the other maids, people have been lynched for less .. black people that is.

Skeeter persists and eventually they make a start on the book. But it's not just a dangerous time for the maids, it's a very dangerous time for Skeeter.

Full of the flavours of the deep south, it's a book to make you smile a lot but also to make you ashamed of those white ladies and their polite faced racism. The irony of them having one of their do-gooding fund raisers for the 'poor people of Africa', whilst treating their own maids like dirt was completely lost on them.

The only downside to it was it made me permanently hungry with it's constant talk of chicken pot and lemon chiffon pie's, angel cake's and hush puppies mmm mm.

I stretched it out for as long as I could, it was such an enjoyable listen.