Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.
Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.
In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women—mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends—view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.
Set in the early sixties in Jackson, Mississippi, The Help is an incredible debut novel told from the point of view of three different narrators: Aibileen, a single black woman in her fifties is a domestic for a young family with one child, Minny is a younger married woman with a houseful of kids, an abusive husband and a very sharp tongue that has lost her many a job. Skeeter Phelan, a white,single recent graduate from Ole Miss still residing with her parents, is the only woman in her sorority sisters' bridge club that has a dream to do something with her life. Skeeter wants to become a writer and manages to interest a publisher in a possible book about black domestics and their relationship to their white employers. In a dichotomous society and a time of increasing racial tensions, this was a dangerous thing to do, both for Skeeter and for the maids. Racing against a seemingly impossible deadline, Skeeter, Aibileen, Minny and 10 other maids manage to secretly write the book that eventually causes a social brouhaha while changing the lives of all involved. Although they had some fears and doubts at times, these courageous women were but a small beginning catalyst in the fight for civil rights.
This book made me run the gamut of emotions; from mad to sad to glad. It made me mad to see how the white women treated the black women as if they were invisible and unfeeling. At one point in the book, Aibileen tells Skeeter that she had commented that black people attend too much church and that comment had stuck with Aibileen. Skeeter wondered what else she had said ,"never suspecting the help was listening or cared". They expected their maids to do all the housework and cooking while paying them next to nothing. It seems ludicrous that while the maids were entrusted with the most important job of virtually raising their employers' children, they were not even allowed to use their employers' bathrooms. It made me sad to see how they were treated as if they had no human feelings at all and how they were supposed to be grateful, never complain or feel any indignity at their treatment. The book also made me glad because Skeeter,one of the kindest of the white women, managed to put one of her own sorority sisters in her place. She also came to understand they were all sisters under the skin and to get an idea of what the domestics had to put up with in their lives. Aibileen tried to give the white children she raised a sense of respect for themselves and other people at the same time that she gave them a lot of love.
Ms. Stockett does a wonderful job giving voice to all her characters bringing them, their surroundings and their feelings so vividly to life. The social tensions of the times are also very well done. I found it extremely easy to visualize every scenario in the book and deeply empathized with the characters. It's heartrending, poignant and uplifting all at the same time. The Help is one book I found really easy to become immersed in and hard to put down. Ms. Stockett is a very talented writer and I am sure this is an auspicious beginning to her career. Be sure to read her, Too Little Too Late thoughts at the end of the book after the acknowledgements. It will give you a sense of the influences in how and why she came to write the book . Highly recommended. 5*
writes,
This book is well-written on so many levels. It's one of the books about which I want to simply say, "Read it. Trust me -- just read it." But I'll try to be more specific. The story is clearly told using alternating points of view (which is a device that I love but is sometimes poorly done). Since two of the three narrators are Black maids living in Mississippi in 1962, they speak in dialect. I have recently realized that I do NOT like reading novels written with too much dialect, but author Kathryn Stockett solved the problem. Instead of a lot of apostrophes and whatnot, she simply wrote the speech out phonetically, so it was readable. It's hard to explain, but if like me you struggle with reading dialect, even if you like the local flavor it creates, trust me that Stockett has done it right.
The characters are so well-written. I grew to love the three main characters and to feel a kinship with them even though my own life and experience couldn't be further away from theirs:
* Skeeter is in her early twenties. She returned home after college and now spends her time writing the Junior League newsletter and playing bridge with her high school friends who are now wives and mothers because each dropped out of college once they got their M.R.S. degree.
* Minny is a maid whose good cooking trumps her quick temper (which caused her to lose a few jobs). She's closest to my age and yet the most different from me. The many challenges she has endured gives her a quiet strength and make this prickly woman one who I long to be able to hug (Am I weird? Does anyone else wish that they could hug characters who exist only on the page)?
* Aibileen displays courage and understanding and above all else -- love and forbearance. She's older, having raised a son of her own along with the seventeen white children she's raised. In spite of their age difference and difference in temperament, she and Minny are best friends.
The minor characters are fully developed as well. They lean a bit closer to stereotype, but Stockett avoids predictable stereotypes even for characters who are stereotypical (after all, we have stereotypes for a reason). They are complex and even though there are villains, they are not simply one-sided.
I have a feeling you are going to be seeing and hearing a lot about this book. I can't recommend it highly enough.
writes,
Kathryn Stockett's The Help is a wonderful debut novel. The Help follows three women in Jackson, Mississippi from 1962-64--Aibileen a 50-something black woman who has worked a a maid her whole life, Minny another black maid in her 30s, and Skeeter a 22 year old white woman who has just finished college at Ole Miss and dreams of being a writer. Desperate to jump start her writing career, Skeeter comes up with an idea to capture the experiences of 12 black maids working in the homes of white women. Skeeter convinces Aibileen, the maid of her best friend Elizabeth, to work on her project. Aibileen then convinces Minny, and other maids to join in the project, despite the potentially brutal consequences if they are discovered. As the women work to complete their book on a tight timeline from a New York publisher, the racial tension heats up in Jackson. Will they be found out, or will they publish their work and show the world the unique relationship between white and black women--where they are all just people--in Jackson.
Stockett alternates among the three main characters as narrators, giving this novel a unique story that is told from the perspective of both the white employer (Skeeter) and the black maids (Aibileen and Minny). As the three women come to understand each other you see the discovery from both perspectives, which gives the novel a deep emotional feel. The relationship that forms among these women is strong, and by the end of the novel I felt like I was one of them. Although the novel has an optimistically happy ending, I found myself crying at the end of these women's remarkable journey.
I think this book has the potential to become a "must read" on race relations in the South, especially for young women. As someone who grew up in a big Southern family, I can say that Stockett's voice is authentic, and she does an excellent job of capturing the feel of the time. I will definitely be recommending this book.
