Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

"Carson McCullers? Truman Capote? Harper Lee? Margaret Mitchell?" Ms. Stockett only wishes! The story may have been worthy of telling, the moral and sociological points may be valid to make---but that's still no excuse for poor character development, poor diction, and really flawed black dialect. And a contrived plot that strains credulity at many points. The whole thing about "the Terrible Awful" pie made of human excrement? Oh, yeah, right, as if the character who ate two pieces wouldn't notice. Perhaps she had severe anosmia, no sense of taste of smell, but if so this was not mentioned by the author. I cringed as I turned each page, but not because of the mistreatment of the blacks in 1963 Mississippi. Harper Lee made their plight jump off the page with her nuanced, tell-the-truth-but-tell-it-slant word-wizardry. Kathryn Stockett is seemingly so eager to get her tale told that she doesn't bother to use character shading, subtle dialogue, and rounding-out of both "good" and "bad" characters to make them all equally, fully human to the reader. In an ironic way, Stockett did just the opposite of what white supremacists did back when, but in reverse. She made all of the white characters "bad" and every black a "saint"---well, with two exceptions. We have "brave" Skeeter defy her Junior League birthright and champion the cause, and there's a stock cardboard figure of a "bad" black husband who beats his long-suffering wife. But every character is colored (no pun intended) with a box of Crayolas---they are caricatures, not characters. Good basic intention, maybe, but really BAD literature.