Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

This is definitely a book to read in the summer.  Sag Harbor is a town on Long Island known for a large African-American summer community.  This book is about one particular summer when Benji (the main character) is 14.  His twin brother and he spend the summer there among their friends and summer jobs and occassionally their parents. 

This book has very little plot.  It's a very rich description of Benji's summer on Sag Harbor - a perfect depiction of a specific time and place and point in someone's life.  During most of the book I felt like I was one of Benji's friends, just running around the town with him and his crew.  The drama of a 14-year old's minutiae was at the center of each chapter - who makes the best waffle cones at work, who is on whose BB-gunfight team, who is going to walk to the beach because the car doesn't seat the whole gang.  And some serious content around his parents' imperfect marriage and his older sister's chosen isolation from the family.  Each chapter seemed to be able to stand alone as a short story - about half-way through I figured out that there was no overarching storyline other than "what happened this summer" so I could enjoy each chapter on its own.

The other thing about the book that I liked was that it depicted life among African-American teens in the 1980's in New York very well.  The division between middle-class and "street" communities, the music, clothes, hairstyles, foods, lots of details of Benji's life both in Sag Harbor and in NYC, where he lived, were described.

I liked this book.  It transported me to Benji's world and showed me a community I didn't know anything about.  Well-written and nicely executed.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Nearly everyone I know who is in a book club or keeps up with modern fiction had read this book by the time I got to it.  Lots of people recommended it and I could see why; although it was not incredibly high-brow literature, the characters were given strong voices and the plot was fast-moving, albeit a bit predictable. 

The story is about "The Help" - that is, the full-time black housekeepers in 1960's Mississippi.  Most of the women who employ them are prejudiced and range from thoughtless to cruel towards them.  Some of the help are treated well, but only when it is convenient for their employers; other help is berated and accused of stealing and other allegations at whim; others are treated with a distance - asked to use a separate bathroom or set of dishes.  And all the while, the housekeepers are engaged in a most intimate of tasks: raising their employers' children while the ladies lunch and play bridge.  Secondarily explored are the social norms and cliques among the white women.  Things in town get interesting when one young white woman, for reasons of her own, decides to befriend the housekeeper community.  The results are both surprising and significant for both her and for the black women. 

The book held my attention because the characters were very compelling.  There were people I rooted for and people I rooted against.  The voices of the different characters were clear and well-developed.  I also found myself wanting to know what would happen to certain characters and storylines.  Stockett did a good job of keeping a lot of themes rolling at once without a lot of complexity. 

It was interesting to read this book just as To Kill A Mockingbird reached its 50th anniversary; set in 1930's Alabama, that book also explored a second class Black community and an empathic White hero.  What was shocking was how little things had changed for Blacks between 1930 and 1960.

I enjoyed this book and categorize it as one that transported me to a different place and time.