It is a very hard read – too long and too “all-over-the-place.” I doubt many readers who begin it can endure to the end (at least without skipping pages.) Stockett wanted to touch on so many subjects of “woke” nature that it became a book about everything. The story of an orphan trapped in an unjust orphanage system, a single female struggling with financial hardship, a gay husband and his family wishing to “cure” him, a goodhearted wealthy alcoholic, a single mother sent to jail by a racist society, etc. etc.
All of this is told from an overtly feminist perspective, despite being set in 1930s Mississippi. The novel finally descends into implausibility when its three central female characters establish and successfully run a brothel in Oxford, Mississippi, as a way of surviving the economic devastation of the Great Depression. As a plot device—and as a statement of feminist empowerment, it sounds ludicrous.
There is not one original idea in this book – everything is predictable because it is premised on an ideological matrix – the plight of women and gays in the 20th century American South. Nothing to discover here, nothing we did not already know. The characters are sentimentalized and well-designed to fit the scheme of historical critique intended by Stockett.