by  John Burnham Schwartz

7.5/10

This would have made a higher rating if the story was totally pulled out of the author’s imagination, but since it’s based on the skeleton of facts, I took a point off.

The skeleton is this – post-war Japan, the Crown Prince of Japan is looking for a wife, and chooses a commoner.  She struggles with Palace life and, as Empress, her own son chooses outside the aristocracy for his wife too.

Those are facts, and what actually did happen.

What Schwartz has done is added some lovely, delicate flesh onto the bones of the story.  The names are not the same, but the story is.

He’s embellished conversations, personalities, occasions, and made it so real, so credible, so empathetic that you actually believe that’s how it all happened.   Haruko (based on the real Empress Michiko) is likeable, real, and charming.  The love story itself is delightful, and so delicately nuanced and so much unspoken that it’s easy to project romantic fantasies.

Haruko is a ‘normal’, attractive, well-educated girl from a well-to-do merchant family – not dissimilar to the Empress’ own roots – has a nice life and is under no pressure to marry.    To choose to marry into the Imperial Household was a big decision, and not one to be undertaken lightly, as we see from the proceedings.

A young Empress Michiko

You wonder how Schwartz has managed to get so much access to what is known to be a very closed court – the Imperial Household is severe, and the description ‘conservative’ doesn’t even begin to describe the tightly-bound ties to tradition, legacy and heritage.  Yet the feeling of ‘insider information’ perpetuates the book.

What’s amazing is that the author is American, yet creates the cadence of a cloistered, blue-blooded Japan perfectly.  While not as delicately wrought as a Kazuo Ishuguro, or Junichiro Tanizaki‘s pacing of silence, the atmosphere he creates really makes you feel you are getting a glimpse into a closed world.  His writing is lyrical, gentle and intimate.

My only criticism is that I would have liked more of the story told – from the time that Haruko becomes Crown Princess to her adjustment to Palace life is strangely missing.

The deviation from what is actual fact is the happy ending that’s created.  We know that the Imperial Household is a prison with no escape, a truly gilded cage.

It’s a lovely read, and a fascinating insight (although not fact, you know he’s done lots of research and is probably as real as it’s going to get) into the Japanese Royal family.  What is most moving of all though, is Haruko’s normal family life, and her relationship with her father.

It’s so easy to believe it’s a real story and everything actually happened as in the book – yet equally the Imperial Household is so alien that it’s just as easy to believe it’s all a work of fiction.

8.5/10

This is a gem of a book.  About a small town in the American South in the early 60s, the book follows the lives of the previously unheard – the black home help in a small Southern town.  Set at the time of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and the demand for racial equality, I feared at first that this would be a political novel.  It isn’t overtly so.

The message is told by the stories and the lives of the main characters, who are lovable, funny, and so real.  It’s an uplifting, lively, enjoyable read.

Skeeter wants to be a writer and undertakes a dangerous project – to chronicle the stories of the maids (black) of the more affluent (white) families.  Skeeter risks alienation from her peers, who are firmly entrenched in keeping the help where they belong, and the maids who come forward risk losing their jobs.

She goes where few whites of the time went – into the lives of the poor black community of the town, and realises that they have whole lives and stories of their own, and not just as maids.  Ironically what the maids see about the families they work for makes you realise that having and not having has nothing to do with colour.

Told with much affection, a light hand with a comic turn, and with characters of such depth you feel you’ll soon see them on Oprah, Kathryn Stockett manages to show how lives were lived then, and what was normal, accepted.

Bonds are forged, broken, eyes are opened, and by the end of the book I was hoping for The Help 2 so I could hang out with these fabulous women more.

There’s a movie in the works so read the book before it comes out and let Kathryn Stockett tell you the story.

For those of us in this part of the world, home help is expected and normal – and many still treat their maids as second or third class citizens or even worse, created just to look after their babies/kids/homes with no expectations of lives of their own.  It makes me crazy.  Maybe one day someone here will write a local version of The Help.  I think we need it.