Good fundamentals in this book: well-written characters whose conflicts drive the story forward. The perspective characters here are Skeeter, Aibileen, and Minny, and each has her own distinctive voice and set of goals and character arcs. You watch them rise and fall, learn, love, adapt, react, everything we want from a good character-driven story. The story moves at a relaxed pace, but it never gets boring.That said, this was Stockett's first novel and a few newbie habits annoyed me. Most significantly, after the brilliant characterization of the heroes, we got this lazy characterization of the villain. Stockett succumbs to the old cliche--the villain is identified by being fat. And, hilariously, as the story progresses and the antagonist gets sympathetic, she also gets fatter (it's telling that other overweight characters are uniformly described as "plump", but "fat" is reserved for Hilly). She also can't resist the old historical irony gag, talking about how smoking couldn't possibly be bad for you and how a reporter was saying that this skirmish in Vietnam would be over quickly. Or there's the fact that Skeeter's life so closely parallels Stockett's own. Or, hell, just read the acknowledgments and look at how many names from her writing workshop found their way into the book. In many ways the story feels borrowed, in a Lifetime-Movie-of-the-week sort of way. Not that it was ever bad--I just would have liked a bit more narrative depth. But I have to come back and give Stockett kudos for not being gun-shy on the plight of domestics in a pre-Civil-Rights Mississippi. She does not pull her punches, and this gives the book a weight that I feel the movie never quite achieved. And while we're comparing...The biggest complaint I heard about the film adaptation was that it was the story of black women being helped by a white woman--that the Civil Rights movement is being white-washed, essentially. The book handles this more gracefully than the movie did. It wraps up less neatly but more honestly than the film.Overall, I liked it. I will never read it again, but there you have it. 

Question: Does this novel have a lot of tension?
Answer: there you have it