Top Shelf
Editor’s summer reading picks for novel and memoirs from debuting regional writers

The Help
By Kathryn Stockett
Putnam

In 1962, the setting for this powerful debut novel, the Civil Rights Act hadn’t been signed, schools professed to be separate but equal and, in much of the South, white children and their mothers were cared for by “the help.”

Both black and white women had complex boundaries and rules, passed down through the generations: The help does not talk back to her employer. Separate bathrooms, separate drinking glasses. White people are not your friends. But before this story ends, rules will be broken.

The friendships in The Help are compelling and complicated. Minny’s sassy voice is joined by Aibileen, older and wiser but still willing to work with a 22-year-old white girl on a potentially dangerous project. A recent Ole Miss graduate, camped out in her parents’ claustrophobic attic, Skeeter acts on an impulse born from her desire to be a famous New York writer. While youthful exuberance may excuse her naïveté, her actions occasionally feel like too much bravado for 1962 Jackson, Mississippi.

The white women here, from the pitiable outcast who turns up drunk at the Junior League benefit wearing a low-cut gown and too-blond hair to bossy Hilly, are occasionally stereotypical, but rarely boring. As Skeeter tells us, “Our places of comfort are expectedley different…Elizabeth’s is hunched over her sewing machine trying to make her life look seamless, store-bought. Mine is at my typewriter writing pithy things I’ll never have the guts to say out loud. And Hilly’s is behind a podium telling sixty-five women that three cans apiece isn’t enough to feed all those…Poor Starving Children of Africa.”

Suspense, humor and stunning writing combine to make this debut novel by Jackson native Kathryn Stockett one you won’t soon forget. There’s never a time when you don’t want to know how it all will end, even when you fear it can’t end well. (Augusta Scattergood)

In the Sanctuary of Outcasts
By Neil White
Harper Collins

There’s probably nothing like being forced to live in the last leper colony in America to change your outlook on life.

And changed it was, indeed, for Neil White, the high-flying publisher of slick magazines in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast. White had been a man who measured worth by appearances, expensive cars, nice homes and fashionable clothes. Generous with his heart and his bank account, his tastes exceeded his income and soon he was kiting checks “as a form of bridge financing.” Eventually, he was caught, convicted and sent to federal prison.

It was, however, no ordinary lockup. White was sent to the federal medical center in Carville, Louisiana, otherwise known as America’s national leprosarium.

Early on, he thought that this strange government experiment—housing federal convicts with leprosy patients—would make a great exposé. As the year progressed, his interaction with the patients led to a far different book.

White then spent a decade reviewing his notes and reliving the mental images of his imprisonment. He was working to get this story as perfect as he could, to repay, in some small part, the debt he owed these men and women, the very last 130 Americans forcibly quarantined by the government.

In this unlikely place, rich with more than 150 years of history, among an unlikely mix of white-collar criminals and leprosy patients, White discovers what is truly important in life.

His memoir is an emotional, incredible true story of crime and redemption, vanity and spirituality, as he discovers happiness, fulfillment and the importance of fatherhood in an extraordinary place that is little known to the outside world.

It is, by turns, hilarious, astonishing, deeply moving and worth your time. (Noel Workman)

Promises I Made My Mother
By Sam Haskell with David Rensin
Foreword by Ray Romano
Ballantine

Sam Haskell’s newly-released Promises I Made My Mother recounts a lifetime of boyhood lessons learned from his mother, Mary Kirkpatrick Haskell, and how these lessons have served as his anchor and lighthouse. For this native Mississippian and former Worldwide Head of Television for the William Morris Agency, his tales of success are equally weighted by stories of struggle, and in some cases, personal redemption.

While light and humorous, Haskell also shares the upheavals of his childhood in Amory, Mississippi, especially the complicated relationship with his father, who eventually takes his own life, and Haskell’s own challenges of becoming a parent himself. Haskell talks frankly about his friendships with Dolly Parton, Ray Romano and his eventual departure from William Morris where he spent 26 years.

Behind every story, however, rings his mother’s enduring voice, reminding her son that anything is possible, honesty is non-negotiable and to live every day to the fullest. Even after his mother’s passing, Haskell finds power and mystery in his mother’s lessons that continually shape his character as a man, husband and father. (Karen Mayer)