I love reading. In fact, I spend most of my time reading: non-fiction work or yoga-related mostly. And blogs. Lots and lots of blogs.

Part of the reason I became a teacher is so I could get paid to read. Seriously, I don’t get people who don’t read. It’s weird.

Anyway, lately I’ve been so busy reading for work, yoga teacher training, and keeping up with all the blogs I follow, I had forgotten how much I enjoy reading fiction. The feeling of falling into a world that is nothing like your own and developing real feelings for characters that only exist in the imagination of the author and cheering for your favorites to overcome the obstacles in their lives.

I decided to revisit this long-lost love while I was traveling and had some good old-fashioned uninterrupted reading time flying across the Atlantic.

Remember earlier this summer I wrote about the adult summer reading program through the Sacramento Public Library?  In order to win prizes (!) you must fill in a bingo card.  I chose the line where you get to choose 3 books of your choice and a biography.

I went on vacation without my laptop and very limited access to the internet. I brought 3 fiction books and breezed through them in the first 5 days of our trip.

This is the first in a series about the books I read while I was on vacation. {You will have a chance to WIN THIS BOOK!}

Title:  The Help

Author: Kathryn Stockett

Genre: Fiction

Setting: 1962 in Jackson, Mississippi

Characters: Abileen, Minny and Miss Skeeter

Synopsis: Abileen and Minny are domestics and Miss Skeeter is a young, white frustrated budding writer that has just graduated from college. Over time, the women develop a secret friendship and decide they are going to tell the truth about what it is like to work for the white families in Jackson. Risky at best and potentially deadly at worst and yet they risk everything to tell their stories.

My thoughts: I had vaguely heard about this book. I had no idea what it was about so when I came upon it in the only English bookshop in Munich I immediately picked it up.

I was intrigued. A Southern white woman writing from the perspective of  pre-Civil Rights African-American women? The author herself had grown up with a domestic and I was definitely curious to find out more about this author and her first novel.

I was hooked from the first chapter and despite my best efforts to pace myself I finished reading the entire novel the day before our endless travel back across the Atlantic. I just couldn’t put it down!

Want to win this book*?